Section 17.5. Why and When It Works

17.5. Why and When It Works

I don't think the process would work as well for a less, shall we say, inspiring case.Volunteers responded because they seriously cared about the outcome, not because they found learning to do legal research fascinating. I have gotten a lot of email about enjoying the learning, actually, but I also know that SCO was an inspiration. For some, watching an attack on Linux is like watching someone kick Dorothy's dog, Toto: people get mad and want to do something about it. You don't get the same response in all cases or by paying people. There isn't enough money in the world to pay me for the amount of work I donated to Groklaw, the nights without sleep, the anxiety, or the jerks I had to deal with sometimes, if I may speak plainly.

But it isn't by any means the only case I or my readers care about. Patents and standards also interest the FOSS community and should there eventually be a patent infringement attack on Linux or GNU/Linux, as I believe there will be, I know for sure that the community will react and be available to help. I hope and expect that Groklaw will be ready to be useful again, perhaps in doing prior-art searches, for example, which could definitely be done completely in the open, in contrast to the legal research in the SCO case.

I also know that if a company had a tech issue and needed to tap into the Groklaw group mind, they could simply place the issue as a comment, and readers would tell them whatever they knew. The encouragement on Groklaw is that you provide either a URL or personal experience to back up the thoughts you've expressed, so that anyone can follow the thread and prove or disprove it. That is vital. It lets everyone know that what they comment about is important, that they must stand behind what they write and be responsible to be careful.

The power of applying open source principals to legal research is real. I've lived it, and I feel it. It worked because no one knows as much as all of us together. There is no law firm in the world that can afford to hire the numbers of researchers Groklaw made available. And a small group of trained paralegals would not have been able to find all the technical information that we at Groklaw found together.

So the bottom line is this: as long as there is the heart and the will to do it, the open source process is effective in doing legal research. If you would like to experience it in action, come and join in the fun.