LAWRENCE LESSIG AND JOTSPOT INVITE THE INTERNET COMMUNITY TO UPDATE ‘CODE’
SAN DIEGO, Calif., March 16, 2005 — ETECH — JotSpot, the first application wiki company, today announced that it is teaming up with Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and renowned legal author, on an update to his 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Professor Lessig is inviting the online community to contribute its collective knowledge to his original work via a JotSpot wiki. Open today at http://codebook.jot.com, the project is an unprecedented experiment in group publishing. Contributions to the public wiki will be aggregated and published in a print update of Code later this year.
“Code has become a part of the culture of cyberlaw,” said Professor Lessig. “When it became time to update it, I thought who better than that culture. There are many who have built upon my insights and I was eager to find a way to enable those further insights to be reflected within Code. JotSpot is the perfect platform for this experiment and I have confidence that by making Code its own, the community will make Code better.”
A key driver behind Professor Lessig’s decision to move forward with this project was recognition of the fact that technology has evolved to a point where large-scale group collaboration can be accomplished with the right tools. Lessig selected the JotSpot platform for this project because it made it easy for people to start contributing content immediately using their existing skills, by offering features such as an advanced WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page editor and easy integration with Microsoft Office. In addition, JotSpot provided the ability to add simple applications to the group wiki to support the collaboration process, including an integrated blog application for posting and syndicating side discussions on the work, and instant messaging presence indicators for easily recognizing which contributors are active/online.
“This project legitimizes the use of wiki technology in a very innovative way,” said Joe Kraus, CEO and co-founder, JotSpot. “Wikis represent a way to harness the power of many and this initiative is a perfect example. Whether it is tapping the expertise of many across the Internet or inside a company, wikis are the next step in democratizing publishing.”
JotSpot founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer also founded Digitalconsumer.org in 2001, a non-profit committed to preserving consumers’ digital rights. In the spirit of open content and open source, JotSpot offers its wiki service for free use for any open source development project.
Project Overview
Professor Lessig first published “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” in 1999. After five years in print and changes in law, technology and the context in which they reside, Code required an update. Employing 15 volunteer ‘chapter captains’ as managers on the JotSpot wiki, Professor Lessig is inviting the public to contribute to an update. Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and prepare it for publication. The resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization focused on flexible copyright.
About JotSpot
JotSpot, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., is the first application wiki company. Founded and led by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, the company has a mission of making Web applications simple to build through the power of wiki. The JotSpot technology turns today’s document wiki into an application development platform and expands the boundaries of what a wiki can do for enterprise and workgroup users. For more information, please visit www.jotspot.com.