Picture this: Microsoft's crack legal team invests countless hours and dollars perfecting a legal strategy to counter the US government's antitrust charges.
Then, just weeks before the case goes to trial, the company details its plan in a full-page ad in The New York Times.
Insanity? Perhaps. But that's exactly the kind of legal strategy that Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig feels his profession should pursue in certain judicial cases.
Taking a page from the open-source software movement, Lessig is out to turn the traditionally adversarial and secretive world of the legal system on its head.
"We're testing the idea that the sort of 'parallel processing' that goes on in open-source software development can be used effectively, in some cases, in developing a legal argument," said Lessig.
Lessig's new model -- called open law -- is an effort to infuse appropriate cases with the same spirit of cooperation and good will that built critical Internet plumbing software, such as Linux, Apache, and SendMail.
Lessig is testing the approach with Eldred v. Reno -- a challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Passed in October, the law extends to 70 years the copyright protection that for most works used to be valid until 50 years after the author's death.
In January, Eric Eldred, founder of Eldritch Press -- a company that publishes the full text of rare and out-of-print books on its Web site -- challenged the law in a federal lawsuit.
Now Eldred has some volunteer help from teams of law students at Harvard and at the Intellectual Property Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
In the coming weeks, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society will publish five or six of the students' potential legal arguments on the open-law site.
