Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Currently, we are witnessing clashes of alternative governance approaches to the digital in various battlefields: there are fights over the relation between copyright v. public domain, over proprietary v. open-source software, and over freedom v. control in the Internet carriers "spectrum" and "broadband". Complaining about "a kind of McCarthyism that increasingly infects any debate about intellectual property in Washington", Lawrence Lessig recently pointed out in one of these fields that a robust "software ecosystem" based on a balance between proprietary and non-proprietary technology is better than either extreme.

Recently, the German Max Planck Society - an independent, non-profit research organization to promote scientific progress in the natural sciences as well as the humanities - established the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. While a temporary research group on this topic has been existing since 1997, the permanent institute was founded at the end of August this year. For a comprehensive description of its mission and current projects have a look at the institute's English website.