Developments within bioinformatics and software for data exchange in the life sciences raise important new questions for social informatics. In this paper, I analyse the role of property rights in information in directing these technical developments in the direction of certain social values. In particular, I focus on initiatives for networking distributed databases, operating both on a global scale (such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) and in more single-issue networks (such as the European Human Frozen Tumor Tissue Bank). Three institutional models for developing such distributed networks for sharing information are presented and briefly discussed.