Open Source Drafting

Lawyers especially common law lawyers have a great respect for precedent and not only do courts follow precedent but lawyers have traditionally used precedents in drafting legal documents. These tend to get handed down from one lawyer to another, being modified all the while, and tested in courts from time to time.

Thus most legal documents are the result of the combined effort and experience of many lawyers. So in a sense, lawyers have always been engaged in open source drafting. This plog or project log just makes the whole process more explicit. Please help to make South African Creative Commons licence reflect the combined ingenuity and experience of South African copyright lawyers and our creative community.

The Open Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society is engaged in a similar process of collaborative drafting but for purposes of litigation.

I’ll be publishing the various portions of the Draft South African Creative Commons Licence on this log, so that we can take each piece apart and see how works. Since I expect many commentators will be lawyers we’ll probably argue about it a bit.