| Summary: | The expansion of practices for sharing cultural artifacts made possible by digitization and communication networks has led researchers to apply the notion of commons to the field of intellectual property – in cases such as open-source software, Wikipedia, and open-access scientific publication, for example. This article deals with linguistic and terminological issues raised by this concept and its translations (in particular, into Portuguese); examines common sources of misunderstanding, such as the conflation of the legal, economic, and theological meanings of “commons”; reviews similar words and phrases in other languages; and discusses the merits and disadvantages of the existing options in Portuguese – mainly the option for “common goods” [“bens comuns”].
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