ABSTRACT
A central issue in the history of intellectual property has been how to balance the private rights awarded to those who develop important (and
socially valuable) knowledge, with the public good of freely accessible knowledge resources. The knowledge commons, from which intellectual property has temporarily rendered certain items as property, have always been implicitly recognized in law.2 Commons are collectively owned (for knowledge and information at the global level we might say owned by humankind), which allows an immediate recognition of the costs imposed when knowledge passes from potential collective ownership to actual private ownership (even if this is only temporary). Indeed by making such property temporary (by limiting the duration of protection), socially useful knowledge is subsequently returned to these commons. This also recognizes that many aspects of new knowledge are actually drawn from the extant pool of information and knowledge represented by these commons. However, although such extraction from the commons was originally (in the 17th and 18th centuries) regarded as a privilege accorded only in certain circumstances, the subsequent history of intellectual property has seen it gain the status of a right.
