This chapter examines when goods become owned. It starts with the traditional Demsetz model and then considers cases of nonlinear transaction costs.

Taxonomic and evolutionary species (T-species and E-species) can be viewed as distinct ontologically. Conventional taxonomic species are cognitive concepts, refined by biological theory, which tessellate the living world into comprehensible but imperfectly delimited units to provide an overview of biodiversity – the public domain status quo species system. A single named taxonomic species may consist of multiple species taxon concepts, each of which is objectified by the specimen sets used – Simpson's hypodigms. The resulting compound species taxon may thus be vague. Evolutionary species are predicted from evolutionary theory, and serve as models for investigating evolutionary processes. They are tools for biologists to probe deeper into biological reality and generate hypotheses of patterns that lie beyond the confines of human cognition. Cryptic species of result from the feedback to taxonomy of discoveries in evolutionary biology and may differ from species taxa in data, analysis method, or species criterion. Their recognition as taxonomic species requires social convention among biologists, especially systematists and they should be objectified as published taxon concepts using protocols including description, diagnosis, hypodigm and a correct name. The public domain taxon system would benefit if species taxon concepts werebased on a system of online databases

Using Joyce’s oeuvre as a sample case, Robert Spoo’s chapterenvisions a new global commons.From James Joyce’s lawsuit against Samuel Roth in 1927 to the decisions in the case between Carol Schloss and the Joyce Estate in 2000s, Joyce has served as the exemplar of issues around copyright in modernist literature. Following his recent history of American protectionist copyright law and public domain, Spoo first maps out the new possibilities for critical readings and publication following the passage of Joyce’s works into the public domain, following the expiration of copyright in most European Union countries on January 1, 2012. He will then sketch the recently emerged contradictions of international public domain. In response to this situation, which he calls “tragedy of the uncoordinated global commons,” Spoo will follow the precedent of Ezra Pound’s 1918 proposed statute to reform US copyright law, which combined perpetual, exclusive copyright with expansive compulsory licenses that required fixed royalties on sales, and offer a proposal for the global circulation of literature based on a reworked notion of the earlier US practice of “trade courtesy.” The chapter closes by arguing that a fertile public domain, in which creative resources are made accessible through cooperation and sharing, is essential to the future of modernism and of modernism scholarship.

The domination of the Shakespeare publishing field by the Tonson cartel came under challenge from various quarters over the course of the eighteenth century. This chapter charts the efforts of a number of English publishers to break the cartel's monopoly. The legal and regulatory background is traced and the various challenges across the century are registered, including initiatives launched by Thomas Johnson, Robert Walker, Thomas Cotes and John Bell. Attention is paid to the first English edition of Shakespeare published outside London: Thomas Hanmer's text, issued in conjunction with the university press at Oxford. The chapter concludes with a consideration of John Stockdale's editions which, in one configuration, offered the first single-volume text to have appeared since the end of the seventeenth century.