PT Journal
AU Wielsch, D
TI Governance of Massive Multiauthor Collaboration – Linux, Wikipedia, and Other Networks: Governed by Bilateral Contracts, Partnerships, or Something in Between?
SO JIPITEC
PY 2010
BP 96
EP 108
VL 1
IS 2
AB Open collaborative projects aremoving to the foreground of knowledge production.Some online user communities develop into longterm projects that generate a highly valuable and atthe same time freely accessible output. Traditionalcopyright law that is organized around the idea of asingle creative entity is not well equipped to accommodate the needs of these forms of collaboration. Inorder to enable a peculiar network-type of interactionparticipants instead draw on public licensing modelsthat determine the freedoms to use individual contributions. With the help of these access rules theoperational logic of the project can be implementedsuccessfully. However, as the case of the WikipediaGFDL-CC license transition demonstrates, the adaptation of access rules in networks to new circumstances raises collective action problems and suffersfrom pitfalls caused by the fact that public licensing isgrounded in individual copyright.Legal governance of open collaboration projects is alargely unexplored field. The article argues that the license steward of a public license assumes the position of a fiduciary of the knowledge commons generated under the license regime. Ultimately, thegovernance of decentralized networks translatesinto a composite of organizational and contractual elements. It is concluded that the production of globalknowledge commons relies on rules of transnationalprivate law.
ER