anticommons
anticommons noun: the reverse of a commons; a situation in which a resource is subject to fragmented rights, whereby potential users can exclude one another.
Noun
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.
- 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.1998 May 1, Michael A. Heller, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research”, in Science, volume 280, number 5364, →DOI, pages 698–701
- A substantial amount of current empirical evidence supports the conclusion that an anticommons has not developed.2007, Peter K. Yu, Intellectual property and information wealth, page 289
Forms of anticommons
| plural | anticommons |
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Origin of anticommons
Coined by Michael Heller, based on "tragedy of the commons", a term coined by Garrett Hardin.
Questions about anticommons
- What does anticommons mean?
- Anticommons means the reverse of a commons; a situation in which a resource is subject to fragmented rights, whereby potential users can exclude one another.
- What part of speech is anticommons?
- Anticommons is a noun.
- What is the plural of anticommons?
- The plural of anticommons is anticommons.
Words near anticommons in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: anticommons (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “anticommons.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/anticommons. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.