Contributors to open-content projects act from a (probably irreducible) diversity of motivations[1]—from a desire to practice or to pass along the contributor’s unique skills or knowledge,[2] to political opposition to the predominance of the proprietary production paradigm for informational goods and the agendas of the large and powerful enterprises that the dominant paradigm sustains,[3] to the sense of satisfaction and reputational gains that derive from having one’s expertise recognized and appreciated,[4] to the enjoyment of solving complex problems[5] to simple altruism or the desire to advance human knowledge.[6] Depending on their motivation, individual contributors to open-content projects may react differently to the discovery that the licenses authorizing them to modify and redistribute the content on which they worked are subject to possible termination. For example, those disinclined to see proprietization as an evil to be avoided (such as developers of BSD-licensed software) may be indifferent to the possibility of termination of the license. On the other hand, contributors motivated more strongly by a desire to build a commons of works that will remain freely reusable in perpetuity may view the risk of termination very differently. Those users may have contributed to the project based partly on the understanding that the work to which they contributed would remain forever available for others to copy and modify. Provisions of many existing open-content licenses encourage precisely this presumption.[7] Under existing U.S. copyright law, however, licensors may be disabled from delivering upon a promise of a perpetual, irrevocable license.
- ↑ See Benkler, supra note 11, at 92–99 (noting that economic models of behavior uniformly tend to oversimplify complexities underlying human action); Weber, supra note 9, ch. 5 (attempting to disentangle collective from individual motivations); Andrew George, Note, Avoiding Tragedy in the Wiki-Commons, 12 Va. J.L. & Tech. 8, ¶¶ 9–34 (2007) (focusing particularly on various motivations of contributors to Wikipedia); Karim R. Lakhani & Robert G. Wolf, Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects, in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software 3 (Joseph Feller et al., eds., 2005); Katherine J. Strandburg, Evolving Innovation Paradigms and the Global Intellectual Property Regime, 41 Conn. L. Rev. 861, 871 & n.37 (2009) (noting relatively weak role of traditional economic incentives in peer production).
- ↑ See Weber, supra note 9, at 134–35; George, supra note 148, ¶¶ 12–15.
- ↑ See Weber, supra note 9, at 139–40; George, supra note 148, ¶¶ 19–20.
- ↑ Benkler, supra note 11, at 94 (“there will be some acts that a person would prefer to perform not for money, but for social standing, recognition, and . . . instrumental value”); Raymond, supra note 47, at 97–100, 102–03 (describing FOSS development as a “gift culture” in which contributors compete, in part, to improve their own reputations as skilled coders); Weber, supra note 9, at 141–43; Fisk, supra note 85, at 88–92 (emphasizing how reputational motivations are fostered by mandatory attribution policies); George, supra note 148, ¶¶ 30–34.
- ↑ See Raymond, supra note 47, at 100–02.
- ↑ Jyh-An Lee, New Perspectives on Public Goods Production: Policy Implications of Open Source Software, 9 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 45, 53–55 (2006); George, supra note 148, ¶¶ 16–18. But see Weber, supra note 9, at 131 (identifying several aspects of peer production that tend to weigh against altruism as a primary motivating factor).
- ↑ See supra notes 72–74, 120, 140 and accompanying text.
