Revisiting "The Information Semicommons"

In 2003, I published The Information Semicommons in the Berkeley Technology Law Review. The article’s core claim was based on Henry Smith’s “Semicommon Property Rights and Scattering in the Open Fields.” Smith developed the notion of a semicommons to explain why ownership of parcels of land in medieval England were often scattered across open fields. The scattering was to gain advantages that came from mixing common and private use of the same resource. The overall positive interaction of private and common uses of property led me to seek to apply it to information ownership in my 2003 article. In publishing the article, I had hoped to capture the importance of a new theoretical approach to intellectual property law that would allow for greater benefits for society, individual creators, inventors and those in the marketplace. This article measures the impact of that article almost fifteen years later and determines and what the future holds for the information semicommons’s theory.