failing,[1] it is hardly difficult to locate examples of essentially moribund projects on Wikisource or any of the smaller WMF sites. In contrast, the Distributed Proofreaders architecture channels user participation by requiring users to select from a small number of currently ongoing projects if they wish to participate, and may actually provide some structural advantages here.[2]
V. CONCLUSION
Despite remarkable successes in the past fifteen years or so, no open-access project for primary legal source materials approaches the size and sophistication of the large proprietary legal databases. Proprietary database publishers benefit from an inflow of subscriber revenues that no open-access project can hope to match;[3]
A variety of high-quality informational goods have been produced using nonproprietary production processes that aggregate the individual contributions of a wide community of volunteers. As a matter of principle, there is no reason why such a crowdsourced production process might not be employed to extend access to legal materials and scholarship. The technological architecture for building new open-access projects in the legal arena is already in place; all that is missing is a sufficiently large pool of contributors willing to assist in building the informational commons as their interests and abilities permit. indeed, the whole point of the open-access movement is to provide an alternative to the proprietary subscriber-access paradigm and make information freely accessible to all.
To maximize the overall benefit to the information commons, crowdsourced projects should aim to supplement rather than to supplant existing open-access repositories for legal works. New projects should aim at building strength in areas where existing repositories are weak: they should focus more on legislative and executive materials rather than case law, and more on historical rather
- ↑ But see Eric Goldman, Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and its Consequences, 8 J. Telecomm. & High Tech. L. 157 (2010) (arguing that, despite its successes to date, Wikipedia’s architecture and the lack of traditional user incentives makes the past pace of user contribution unsustainable).
- ↑ It is difficult to know whether the larger active user base at Distributed Proofreaders reflects superior architecture, or simply longer existence; after all, Distributed Proofreaders has been around for a decade, and may also draw contributions from users interested in Project Gutenberg, a nearly four-decade-old project.
- ↑ See Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 797, 827–28 (2006).
