Research Resources: Reclaiming the Commons

The Berkman Center engages in the study of a wide range of Net issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control and electronic commerce. The Center understands the Internet as a social and political space where constraints upon inhabitants are determined not only just through the law, but, more subtly, through technical architecture ("code"). The website contains a considerable number of publications on these topics.

This website contains a collection of papers from a November 2001 conference, which center on the study of the concept of the “public domain”—its importance, its history, its role in science, art, and in the building of the Internet, as well as how it is similar to and different from the idea of a commons. Topics covered include the human genome, appropriationist art (such as hip-hop), the production of scientific data, and the architecture of communications networks.

The Digital Library of the Commons is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus; and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.

The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), founded in 1989, is a nonprofit association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively by communities in developing or developed countries.

The Natural Assets Project examines the scope for reducing poverty through asset building in the form of natural capital. Natural assets include both environmental sources and sinks. "Sources" include raw materials, renewable and non-renewable, such as forests, fisheries, soil, and minerals. "Sinks" are the capacities of media such as air and water to absorb and decompose the wastes from production and consumption. The institute aims to design pro-poor natural asset- building strategies to further its goals of both conversation and environmental justice or equity.

The Robyn Van En Center provides a national resource center about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) for people across the nation and around the world. The Robyn Van En Center also offers outreach and works to gain publicity about CSA farms in order to benefit community farmers and consumers everywhere.

Founded by law professor Lawrence Lessig (author of Free Culture), The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program that brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.

This website, designed as a supplement to the book of the same name (published by Harvard Press, 2003), also provides a wide range of resources for understanding current debates about the legal status of indigenous art, music, folklore, biological knowledge, and sacred places, as well as the ways those issues intersect with current debates regarding the commons, the public domain and intellectual property.