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Cyber Profs Set Up A Communal Writing Project To Establish A Standard For Decentralized Legal Scholarship

Angelique van Engelen - 9/16/2007

A group of cyber professors specializing in law and intellectual property rights are conducting an interesting experiment; they are writing a communal article, just to prove that decentralized legal scholarship might be a rather viable concept. The subject? Intellectual Property. Those two words.

The rules? Each participant is allowed one sentence which leads on from the previous entrant’s line. Just like in the live comedy performances. The five cyber profs (Jim Gibson, Orin Kerr, Malla Pollack, Richard Stern, and Susan Crawford) that started off the article didn’t completely stick to legalese; they bestowed the experiment a touch of adventurous imagination, writing:

“Intellectual property is neither intellectual nor property. Or at least that's what some people think; in reality, a moment's reflection will reveal that this is completely wrong. More correctly, a moment's reflection will reveal that the courts consider this completely wrong. But they, too, are quite wrong. It was a dark and stormy night.”

Commenting on the project, David Levine, of the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School says, ‘Of course, this is the logical extension of the wave of decentralization in the operations of all things carbon-based. This is good stuff and I look forward to reading the finished product. I'll also be fascinated to see how the article is cite-checked.”

So far over 80 people, including an unhealthy dosage of spammers, are weaving the article. It appears that despite the lighthearted approach, the participants are rather serious.

They have to be, because the plan is to post it on the SSRN (Social Science Research Network) as a draft. The SSRN aims to rapidly worldwide disseminate social science research. It encourages the early distribution of research results by publishing abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of top quality research papers around the world.