Openlaw

What is Openlaw?

Openlaw is a pretty interesting project, really. This project is being conducted at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard School of Law. The project is aimed at the release of case arguments under a copyleft licensing scheme, so as to encourage suggestions for improvement from the general public.

Copylefting, by the way, is a way for creators to release artwork, literature, music, software, etcetera, into the public for free, in such a way that it remains free. Copylefting is different from free content or public domain in one vital way. Where public domain or free content can be reproduced and sold by anyone in the world for any price, copylefted work is actually protected by copyright, it’s just that that copyright license demands that the work remain free. So if you obtain a copyleft protected book, for example, you may reproduce that book, post it online, share it with your friends, rewrite the book, or make the book into a movie, etcetera, but only on the grounds that, in whatever form you put that book out, it is offered for free, and the same right to rewrite or otherwise publish, reproduce, or manipulate the book is maintained through every incarnation and publishing of that book.

Openlaw, then, applies this concept to legal proceedings.

The Berkman Center focuses on “cyberlaw”, which is the field of law pertaining to things like hacking and encryption, as well as copyrighting on the internet. This center has strong ties with the open source communities, as well (open source community being a collection of websites and other online communities where copyleft protected software and media are often released), and so, it’s only natural that discussions regarding open source, or copyleft protected legal proceedings would come up.

Openlaw is largely based on the concept of open source code, wherein a video game or a piece of content where the programming is unencrypted, allowing amateur programmers to look at, and learn from, the actual programming. In general, video games and programs are encrypted as such to disallow anyone from looking at how the program actually works, even though the final product has been released to the public.

The Openlaw project, then, parallels open source coding. Where, traditionally, a law firm will discuss a case and write arguments in private, and then release the “final product” (the argument) to the public in courtroom, so will a video game programmer keep his methods more or less hidden, only releasing the final software. The idea behind Openlaw would be to allow the actual decision making process behind the argument public knowledge.

The benefits of such a system should be obvious, but to go a little further, we can look at how open sourcing has affected the programming communities.

Take for example the hobbyist’s video game creator program OHRRPGCE. The author of this program, James Paige, has been working on it for over a decade now as a sort of pet project. When he first started working on it, he would charge a fee for the full working version of the program, but when the graphical ability of the program became outdated, he started releasing it as a copyleft protected piece of open content for hobbyists, but still, for the longest time, kept the actual coding private. When he finally decided to unencrypt the program and leave it as open source software, he wound up receiving advice and assistance from literally dozens and dozens of knowledgeable code writers who had been fans of the program for some years. Almost overnight, problems and bugs that had plagued users since the program was released were eliminated, the sound capabilities of the program were updated from chunky old bleep and bloop MIDI sounds to full scale MP3, and what’s more, anyone who wanted to customize the program to fit their video game design a little better was free to do so.

So then, the idea behind Openlaw is that, by leaving the actual decision making process open to public perusal, armchair legal experts might actually be able to make suggestions and offer advice which can improve the process. Not to mention, the actual workings of writing an argument can be released for the use of students at law schools to study.