Center for the Public Domain (formerly Red Hat Center)

Supported Organizations

The Center for the Public Domain has awarded over $5 million in grants to projects worldwide.

Berkeley Center for Law and Techology (California) [ http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/index.html ]
The mission of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology is to foster beneficial and ethical advancement of technology by promoting the understanding and guiding the development of intellectual property and related fields of law and policy as they intersect with business, science and technology. The Center for the Public Domain provided funding to support a year of intellectual property law research by attorney Fred von Lohmann. Learn more about Mr. von Lohmann's work at http://mofo.sranet.com/mofocgi/getperson?4602.

Center for Media Education (CME) (District of Columbia) [ http://www.cme.org/ ]
CME works to ensure that the media system serves the public interest. The Center for the Public Domain provided CME a grant to fund, as part of its Democratic Access Project, a conference of policy makers, advocates, and attorneys at Stanford University in December 2000 to discuss the importance of end-to end-architecture and open access on the Internet and in future technologies (http://www.law.stanford.edu/e2e/).

Collaborative Ownership in a Digital Economy (CODE) (England) [ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/CODE/ ]
A partnership between Academic Europaea and the Arts Council of Cambridge, England, CODE (an April 2001 meeting) will examine issues such as community and copyright, recovering the 'collective' independent networks of research and collaboration, the need for intellectual property systems to evolve in line with changing technologies, the shifts in conventional approaches to learning and research enabled by collaborative technologies and the emergence of open code and open content applications as key drivers of the knowledge economy. Read about the conference in Jane Szita's article, Whose DNA is it anyway? [ http://www.doorsofperception.com/MAGAZINE/codemag.html ]

Conference on the Public Domain (North Carolina)
A collaboration of Duke Law School and the Center for the Public Domain, the Conference on the Public Domain scheduled for November 2001 aims to be a producer, rather than a consumer, of empirical and theoretic perspectives on the public domain by offering "best practices" models of the disparate research being done on very different areas of intellectual property. By commissioning a series of discussion papers from leaders in the field, the conference will frame the current debate in a number of key areas, ranging from constitutional litigation to national innovation policy.

Consumer Project on Technology (CPT) (District of Columbia) [ http://www.cptech.org/ ]
Established by Ralph Nader, CPT focuses on intellectual property rights and health care, electronic commerce and competition policy. The Center for the Public Domain provided funds to support responses to intellectual property concerns that have important consequences regarding compulsory licensing of patented medicines in developing countries. The Center for the Public Domain also funded the CPT's Comments to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on the Hague Conference on Private International Law's Proposed Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters. Read more about these projects at http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/eu/larnynielson27092000.html and http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/uspto-comments.html.

Cornell University Law School - Legal Information Institute (LII) (New York) [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/ ]
Launched in 1992, LII improves public access to law in the United States by placing key legal materials on the Internet in non-proprietary format, structured in ways that facilitate unrestricted use. LII receives more than 8 million hits a week. More than 90,000 web pages link to LII, including those of the White House and the U.S. House of Representatives, and it has been cited as a resource in more than 500 newspapers and magazines. The Center for the Public Domain provided funding that updates LII technology and allows web users to read any portion of the U.S. Code as it was in effect at particular points in time. Read more about LII at http://lii.law.cornell.edu.

Creative Commons
A coalition of faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Duke University Law School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford Law School, the IP Conservancy is a non-profit organization facilitating the collection and distribution of all forms of intellectual property under the a GPL-like license. The Center for the Public Domain provided funding to help establish the conservancy.

Duke University School of Law - Intellectual Property and the Public Domain Fellowship Program (North Carolina)
With one of the strongest intellectual property programs in the U.S. and some of the most distinguished intellectual property scholars in the country, Duke Law is an elite law school with a strong commitment to producing "lawyers for the public." The Center for the Public Domain has provided funding to Duke Law School to create a program of public interest fellowships in intellectual property and cyberlaw, focused on preserving the public domain. Goals of the Fellowships include representing the public interest in developing policy proposals and engaging in public education on issues concerning the public domain and "the free information ecology"; identifying, training, and developing a new generation of public interest lawyers who will work in the Internet and intellectual property areas; creating links between academia and the public interest organizations currently working in these fields.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (California) [ http://www.eff.org/ ]
A leading organization focused on representing the rights of individuals worldwide, EFF works in the public interest to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression in the arena of computers and the Internet. EFF works to preserve free expression by upholding rights to digital free expression from political, legal and technical threats, defining digital privacy by empowering people to maintain their privacy and control their digital identity and ensuring systems are designed to respect people's rights, such as free speech, privacy and fair use. The Center for the Public Domain provided general funding support for EFF, as well as funding in support of public support of public education about EFF's work on the DVD/DeCSS encryption lawsuit. (http://www.eff.org)

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) (District of Columbia) [ http://www.epic.org/ ]
EPIC is a public research center established to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values. As part of a wide range of landmark reports on critical issues affecting the future of the Internet, EPIC will publish "Surfer Beware IV," a report that examines the extent to which proprietary standards are threatening the privacy, freedom of expression, and the open architecture of the Internet. Learn more about Surfer Beware reports at http://www.epic.org/Reports/.

Federation for a Free Informational Infrastructure (FFII) (Germany) [ http://www.ffii.org/ ]
FFII is a public interest association designed to promote competition in software development and to fund public interest. The Center for the Public Domain provided funding to support documentatiupport documentation and research work on software patents, as well as web publication of results. A progress report of FFII's European Software Patent Documentation can be found at http://www.ffii.org/news/j3m1.

Free Software Foundation (FSF) (Massachusetts) [ http://www.fsf.org/ ]
The Free Software Foundation is dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, understanding, and modification of computer programs by promoting the development and use of free software in all areas of computing. The Center for the Public Domain provided funding for general support of FSF. (http://www.fsf.org)

ibiblio.org (North Carolina) [ http://www.ibiblio.org/ ]
Home to one of the largest "collections of collections" on the Internet, ibiblio is a conservancy of freely available and publicly accessible information, including music, literature, art, history, software, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio combines cutting edge technology and advanced authoring tools to create an Internet-based, contributor-maintained, public library of freely available, diverse, high-quality resources. ibiblio averages 1.5 million information requests per day. A free and vibrant exchange of ideas among a large community of contributors who share their knowledge across disciplines, ibiblio uses the open source model to encourage users to help shape the way information is managed and accessed in the 21st century.

Information Law Institute at New York University School of Law, "Commons Project." (New York) [ http://www.law.nyu.edu/ili/ ]
Over the next two years, a multi-disciplinary working group from MIT, NYU, University of Chicago, Duke, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia University, the National Academy of Sciences and other organizations will meet to chart progress and set goals on a number of independent projects relating to the potential of commons as mechanisms for the organization of information production and exchange in the digitally networked environment.

Specific projects include the develops include the development of collaborative teaching materials, Internet archiving, and mapping of the commons. Members will also examine commons models such as scientific production, the Los Alamos Archive, and established environmental conservancies. Project initiated by Yochai Benkler [ http://www.law.nyu.edu/benklery/ ] and Pamela Samuelson [ http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/ ].

The National Academies' Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) for the Project on Intellectual Property in the Knowledge-Based Economy (District of Columbia) [ http://www.nationalacademies.org/ ]
The Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) Board is undertaking a study of intellectual property policy to examine the consequences of the series of legislative actions, judicial decisions, institutional changes, and international agreements that have marked intellectual property policy over the past 20 years.

The committee will look at the possibility that Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) should proceed further to encourage technical advance, investment, and innovation in juxtaposition to claims that in some circumstances IPRs have been extended too far and may be inhibiting competition and discouraging both research and its communication and use. The project is chaired by Richard Levin, President, Yale University, and Mark Myers, Senior Vice President (ret.), Xerox Corporation.

probono.net (New York) [ http://www.probono.net/ ]
The mission of probono.net is to increase the amount and quality of legal services provided to low-income individuals and communities through innovative uses of technology and to create a virtual community of public interest lawyers that bridges private, legal services, and academic sectors of the profession. The Center for the Public Domain provided funding to support education about technology issues and the law.