- and authenticity of the text. The availability of mechanisms for verifying a text’s authenticity will be an important functionality in encouraging more widespread use of open-access alternatives to proprietary publishers.[1]
In summary, although the legal open-access movement has attained some noteworthy successes, its shortcomings remain prominently visible. For recent federal appellate case law, multiple open-access alternatives exist, some of which have attained great sophistication. Once one moves beyond those types of legal materials, however, the situation becomes far murkier, with haphazard substantive coverage and an underdeveloped suite of tools available to deal with the posted content.
IV. Crowdsourcing as Force Multiplier
A. Building an Informational Commons
A great deal has been written about the “commons-based peer production”[2] phenomenon that began in the world of open-source software[3] and has expanded in the past decade to support mass creation of a wide variety of expressive works.[4] Open-content projects like Wikipedia harness the creative energies of a far-flung community of volunteers and enable them to collaborate asynchronously—their efforts mediated by the distributed architecture of the Internet[5] and given legal stability through a family of specialized copyright licenses.[6] Such mass collaboration—now frequently labeled “crowdsourcing”[7]—enables the distributed
- ↑ See Gallacher, supra note 38, at 40–41.
- ↑ See Yochai Benkler, Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale L.J. 369, 375 (2002).
- ↑ See, e.g., See Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source ch. 4 (2004); Eric S. Raymond, A Brief History of Hackerdom and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary 5, 23–25 (Tim O’Reilly ed., O’Reilly & Associates 2001) (1999).
- ↑ See, e.g., Benkler, supra note 4.
- ↑ This brief, descriptive summary surely understates the aspects of Wikipedia that are the most interesting and worthy of study; for a better assessment, see Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It ch. 6 (2008).
- ↑ For peer-produced works, copyright licensing arrangements substitute for the legal authorizations that would otherwise be provided by the hierarchical structure of a private firm, enabling persons who are legal strangers to share, reuse, and expand one another’s expressive works. See Timothy K. Armstrong, Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the Public, 47 Harv. J. on Legis. 359, 407 (2010).
- ↑ Accessible overviews of the psychological and economic considerations that drive the crowdsourcing phenomenon are available in, e.g., Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the
