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Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. The principal objectives of the WDL are to: Promote international and intercultural understanding; Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet; Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences; Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

"This site hosts the augmented edition of Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age, a book by Philippe Aigrain, with the contribution of Suzanne Aigrain, published at Amsterdam University Press as a paper book and as an open access digital monograph. On this site, you can access the source code and datasets used in the book, comment on each of the book chapters, run our economic models for the financing of a sharing-compatible culture with your choice of parameters, and run our diversity of attention analysis software on your own datasets."

His trip is part of an effort by a group of internet companies and retailers trying to defeat two patents - patents that a patent-licensing company called Eolas and the University of California are saying entitle them to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with "interactive" features, like rotating pictures or streaming video.

"The Open Knowledge Foundation has published a nifty guide on the basics of Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online. You can skim the guide in well under ten minutes, and it includes useful links and accompanying descriptions to online collections where PD works can be found, including Europeana, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. It also contains quite a few references to Creative Commons and succinct explanations of the relevant CC tools, such as the Public Domain Mark and the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. The guide, like all articles at The Public Domain Review, is available for reuse under CC BY."

"While existing laws, business models, and outdated educational practices make it difficult for teachers and learners to leverage the full power of the Internet to access high-quality, affordable learning materials, OER can be freely copied and shared (and revised and remixed) without breaking the law."