“Knowledge Ecology International” hat sein eigenes Journal gegründet, welches, wenig überraschend, “Knowledge Ecology Journal” heisst. In seiner ersten Ausgabe fragt es den renomierten Rechtswissenschaftler James Boyle (Duke University) um seine Definition des Begriffs und seine Antwort trifft recht gut, was wir hier versuchen:

So for me, the knowledge ecology is the network of issues around innovation, access to knowledge, distributed creativity and so on — a network with interconnections we still understand only dimly. The reason to focus on the knowledge ecology, is to get beyond a 2 dimensional debate of intellectual property issues, conducted solely in legal terms — to bring in alternative ideas about innovation, both big and small, to focus on claims of distributional justice, to make distinctions between types of normative claims and knowledge goods. Above all its aim is to do for the world of knowledge, what ecological awareness did to assumptions about development and industrialization. By that I mean that it is important for us to reconsider the simple religion of maximalism, that the answer to every question is to create more intellectual property rights. Just as the environmentalists taught us about the contributions of the ecology to human health, and the need for sustainable development, so we have to develop a more sophisticated sense of the balance between intellectual property rights and the public domain, to understand that it is the interaction between the realm of the free and the realm of the protected that produces innovation, not one of them alone.