Page:Shrinking the Commons.djvu/3

 for their vitality upon specialized copyright licenses. From the operating system to the Firefox web browser to the encyclopedia and far beyond, a host of well-known and widely used informational goods have been created by a global community of volunteers. Their efforts are coordinated—indeed, their self-definitions are partly governed—by a family of copyright licenses crafted to permit successive creators to build upon the efforts of their predecessors and to distribute their shared work product. Recent case law suggests that, consistent with their creators’ intent, these licenses are valid under the Copyright Act: they grant rights to users that would otherwise belong exclusively to the owner of the copyright in the