anticommons

English edit

Coined by Michael Heller, based on "tragedy of the commons", a term coined by Garrett Hardin.

anticommons (plural anticommons)

The reverse of a commons; a situation in which a resource is subject to fragmented rights, whereby potential users can exclude one another.
- 1998 May 1, Michael A. Heller, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research”, in Science‎^[1], volume 280, number 5364, →DOI, pages 698–701:
  However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other.
- 2007, Peter K. Yu, Intellectual property and information wealth, page 289:
  A substantial amount of current empirical evidence supports the conclusion that an anticommons has not developed.