Copyright counterforce Lawrence Lessig is taking a new approach to revising his 1999 treatise on technology, culture, and regulation, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. For the revision, he’s opening up the original text to public comment, criticism, and editing through a rapidly growing web protocol called wiki.
On a wiki web site, visitors not only have authority to view the text and images on the page, but to edit and add text, as well. The technology has been used to create a massive and growing encyclopedia on-line (called the wikipedia), among other things. Lessig has adopted the approach as a public experiment in collective editing.
Business Week has a brief Q&A with Lessig on the project. Mercury News has a short article, as well.
Since so much creative work is collaborative by nature — even the final edited and reviewed text of a single-author book — it will be fascinating to watch how worldwide editing and rewriting of an existing book will work, or not.
If you’ve got an opinion on the book, wiki away!