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for their vitality upon specialized copyright licenses. From the Linux operating system^[1] to the Firefox web browser^[2] to the Wikipedia encyclopedia^[3] 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^[4] crafted to permit successive creators to build upon the efforts of their predecessors and to distribute their shared work product.^[5] 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

additional conditions such as restrictions on downstream users choice of licenses for their own content. See infra notes 64–65, 111, 128 and accompanying text (discussing so-called “copyleft,” “share alike,” or noncommercial usage provisions of some open-content licenses). The term encompasses, at a minimum, open source software, as well as non-software works licensed under the Creative Commons family of licenses. Cf., e.g., Séverine Dusollier, Sharing Access to Intellectual Property Through Private Ordering, 82 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 1391, 1397 (2007) (explaining that “open source” initiatives outside the domain of software are frequently called “open content” or “open access” projects); Andrés Guadamuz González, Scale-Free Law: Network Science and Copyright, 70 Alb. L. Rev. 1297, 1325–26 (2007) (recognizing use of “open content” in a similar sense). Public domain works are also open content, although they ordinarily do not depend for their “openness” on the terms of a license as other open-content works do. But cf. infra Part III.A.3 (discussing public domain licenses).

1. Linux, sometimes labeled “GNU/Linux” to reflect the contributions of the GNU Project, arose from an effort to create a free alternative to the powerful Unix operating system that had been developed at AT&T starting in the late 1960s. See Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source 20–53 (2004) (recounting history of Unix); see also infra note 46. The original Linux kernel was written by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, although the kernel project alone has since grown to include thousands of contributors, and many more developers write Linux application software. Weber, supra, at 94–127 (tracing development of Linux and related projects); see also Eric S. Raymond, A Brief History of Hackerdom, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary 5, 23–25 (1999); Jonathan Zittrain, Normative Principles for Evaluating Free and Proprietary Software, 71 U. Chi. L. Rev. 265, 268–69 (2004).
2. Firefox represents a still rare, although perhaps increasing, phenomenon: a once-proprietary product (Netscape Navigator) released for community development under the open source model. Zittrain, supra note 9, at 278 & n.29; see also Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software 99–112 (Michael M. J. Fischer & Joseph Dumit eds., 2008); Greg R. Vetter, Claiming Copyleft in Open Source Software: What if the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License (GPL) Had Been Patented?, 2008 Mich. St. L. Rev. 279, 312–14.
3. The English language version of Wikipedia is online at http://en.wikipedia.org/ (last visited Mar. 4, 2010). See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom 70–74 (2006); Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations 109–17 (2008).
4. The provisions of a small, but hopefully representative, sample of the many such licenses in existence are considered infra Parts II.B–C.
5. What one observer said of open-source software could be applied more broadly to other open-content communities: “In a very real sense, the open source community figures out its self-definition by arguing about licenses and the associated notions of property, what is worth protecting, that they embody.” Weber, supra note 9, at 85; see also id. at 185 (an open source license “is not simply a set of legal definitions and restrictions. Rather, the license represents foundational beliefs about the constitutional principles of a community and evolving knowledge about how to make it work.”).