Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/17


 * 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.

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.

A. Building an Informational Commons
A great deal has been written about the “commons-based peer production” phenomenon that began in the world of open-source software and has expanded in the past decade to support mass creation of a wide variety of expressive works. 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 and given legal stability through a family of specialized copyright licenses. Such mass collaboration—now frequently labeled “crowdsourcing” —enables the distributed