Fandom and traditional knowledge as limited common property

Mel Stanfill, Fandom, public, commons, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 14. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2013.0530:

Against the background of historically non-strictly-controlled forms of authorship and property, fan creative production seems open for exploitation, particularly in the context of a potential generational culture shift away from hard-line positions on these subjects—nobody owns it, but some may be starting to want to. With things like Fifty Shades of Grey or Kindle Worlds, the indigenous creativity and property parallel is particularly useful, as these projects follow the line of trying to (exploitatively) modernize alternative modes of creative production because the people doing them are imagined to not know their worth.

The problem with such disarticulation from fannish community is that fans are not foolish people freely giving away things they could (and should) be selling any more than are indigenous populations. Instead, fan creative production is productively understood as what [Carol] Rose calls “limited common property,” which is “property on the outside, commons on the inside.”