last—community-centered development—perhaps most in need of strengthening.
III. Technical Background: Open Access Initiatives
Efforts to make legal information freely accessible online represent currents within a much broader stream that is the mass digitization movement. Exemplified by large-scale projects like Google Books,[1] the Internet Archive,[2] and Project Gutenberg,[3] the digitization movement has long since succeeded in making the complete works of Shakespeare[4] and Dickens,[5] among countless others, freely accessible to a global audience. The all-encompassing ambitions of the largest digitization initiatives have, almost by happenstance, swept some legal materials within their ambit; it is possible, for example, to find early volumes of the Harvard Law Review on Google Books, or to read the United States Reports on the
- ↑ The home page of Google Books (formerly known as Google Book Search, which was itself formerly known as Google Print) is available at http://books.google.com/ (last visited Nov. 12, 2009). For an overview of the history and legal issues raised by Google Books, see, e.g., Dan L. Burk, The Mereology of Digital Copyright, 18 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 711, 713–22 (2008).
- ↑ The home page of the Internet Archive is available at http://www.archive.org/ (last visited Nov. 12, 2009). One of the Internet Archive’s distinguishing features is its effort to create a digital archive of the World Wide Web itself (which it labels the “Wayback Machine”) by taking and storing periodic “snapshots” of every site accessible to its software. See, e.g., Internet Archive v. Shell, 505 F. Supp. 2d 755, 760–61 (D. Colo. 2007) (explaining operation of the Wayback Machine); Diane Leenheer Zimmerman, Can Our Culture Be Saved?: The Future of Digital Archiving, 91 Minn. L. Rev. 989, 995–96 (2007). Perhaps less controversially, the Internet Archive also maintains an extensive collection of scanned public-domain texts. See http://www.archive.org/details/texts (last visited Nov. 12, 2009); Peter S. Menell, Knowledge Accessibility and Preservation Policy for the Digital Age, 44 Hous. L. Rev. 1013, 1040–41 (2007) (situating the Internet Archive’s scanning and preservation efforts in historical context).
- ↑ Project Gutenberg’s home page is available at http://www.gutenberg.org (last visited Nov. 12, 2009). The project’s activities are considered in Zimmerman, supra note 43, at 995; Hannibal Travis, Building Universal Digital Libraries: An Agenda for Copyright Reform, 33 Pepp. L. Rev. 761, 784 (2006). Project Gutenberg’s crowdsourced (but not Wiki-driven) proofreading engine, Distributed Proofreaders, is discussed infra at notes 86–106 and accompanying text.
- ↑ Lists of Shakespeare’s works, with links to the text of each, are available at http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s (last visited Nov. 12, 2009); http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Shakespeare (last visited Nov. 12, 2009).
- ↑ Lists of Dickens’s works, with links to the text of each, are available at http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/d (accessed Nov. 12, 2009); http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Charles_Dickens (accessed Nov. 12, 2009). Were he alive today, Dickens himself would likely react unfavorably to the discovery that the natives of far-flung locales could easily read his great works without paying a penny in royalties. See, e.g., Larisa T. Castillo, Natural Authority in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and the Copyright Act of 1842, 62 Nineteenth-Century Literature 435, 436 (2008).
