IBM’s Lotus Symphony is a free-of-charge alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite, based on Sun’s open source OpenOffice software. It purports to remain compatible with Microsoft’s “.doc” format (and newer incarnations), while removing licensing costs (but, not of course, support costs, since people still need training, technical support still costs money, etc.). Now they’ve decided to walk the walk:

360.000 IBM workers have been told to stop using Microsoft Office and switch to the Open Office-based software Symphony.

via IBM Throws Out Microsoft Office — Linux Magazine Online .

In legal circles, standards change slowly — some courts still require WordPerfect documents, years after Microsoft Word eclipsed the former dominant word processor in other fields. Theoretically, of course, Symphony (or OpenOffice) still supports older formats — but I’m sure I’m not the only one to have suffered minor or major incompatibilities — even between different versions of Microsoft Word itself!

So could you make the switch? Would the cost savings be worth the potential hassles?

I mostly have switched away from Word. Unfortunately, I’ve had to keep one licensed copy of Word around to deal with strange issues that may crop up. Usually, these involve collaborative editing projects (“track changes”), or tightly formatted documents, like resumes (which just don’t perfectly translate).

But I have not switched to OpenOffice, nor to Lotus Symphony. I increasingly believe OpenOffice and its kin are courting irrelevancy now that Google Docs and other cloud based office suites are gaining ground, and my tools reflect this.

Is the future in the cloud, not the open-source desktop? My work habits say, “Yes.” (But not without a nagging worry about confidentiality in the cloud.)

So where is the future of legal computing going?

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• Interoperability eludes Office and OpenOfffice (theregister.co.uk)
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I’m excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don’t readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we’ve scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a particular device.

via Inside Google Books: Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format.

This kind of access shows some of the potential of the public domain to allow for innovation and reuse. Thank Google — and Google advertisers, of course — for making it free. (They could legally sell public-domain works — there is no legal requirement that such access be free and open.)

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Randy Picker responds by saying:

We should review how the public domain works. The public domain is sold every day. Every time you buy a copy of Hamlet you are paying for a public domain work. I do H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in my copyright class on this starting with Project Gutenberg — free, of course — and then heading to Barnes & Noble and Amazon, where the prices range from $2.50 to $13.95 see slides 3 to 13. That is precisely the nature of the public domain: anyone can use it for whatever they want, including selling it. The AP is fully within its rights to sell public domain content just as Amazon does every day.

via The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog: The Associated Press: Selling the Public Domain?

To restate: there is absolutely nothing legally wrong with the AP licensing or selling public-domain content. To paraphrase concepts from the open source world, public-domain content is free (as in speech, “libre”) not free as in beer.

As Picker puts it, “Public domain content is outside the copyright system. Again that is its nature.”

You have no right to access of public-domain materials (perhaps unfortunately). You have no right to get them without paying. Instead, such materials are free for anyone to use in any way they wish. The AP can sell the material. You can sell the content. Anyone can do with it what they wish.

(A side note: a license by the AP to such content may be invalid, in the sense that once you have it, you can do with it as you wish — although potentially you may still breach a contract you have with the licensor. Picker, for example, writes, “Ordinary rules regarding contracts and licenses should apply to circumstances under which someone is given access to public domain content.” I can envision counterarguments. In other words: it’s complicated. Thus the existence of lawyers.)

Bizarre? Unfair? Strange? Perhaps. But consider that the protections of copyright are a modern addition to the world. Pre-18th century (to grossly simplify things), if you sold your manuscript, you sold the “copyright” as well. All intellectual creations were, in a sense, in the public domain (although the concept didn’t quite exist — without modern copyright, there is no concept of “public domain” either — there is simply one state, not too).

Modern copyright changed this, and arguably encouraged creation — but it also locks up works in various ways as well. Thus the need for a balance, I believe, between the protections of intellectual property (which is not quite like ordinary property, which is why you only “infringe” IP) and the dizzying freedoms of the public domain.

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The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) — suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the ‘open access’ movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.

via “Should Copyright Of Academic Works Be Abolished?” | Berkman Center.

An interesting proposal that I look forward to reading in more detail. My gut feeling is that, as an academic author, I would be comfortable with this, provided attribution was mandated (as with Creative Commons, which is really based on copyright). After all, while I do not expect to profit directly from any academic work I produce, I need the attribution to me to stay in order to survive in an academic profession that rewards publications and writings. If I lose the attribution, I lose that.

As I said, I look forward to reading Professor Shavell’s draft article in more depth.

The  (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

via the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.

Cearta.ie adds some more details:

It is a peer reviewed biannual journal for high-level analysis and debate about Free and Open Source Software legal issues, and it will receive financial and administrative support from the NLNet Foundation, which supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. Edited by Andrew Katz and Amanda Brock, its focus includes copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes. Unsurprisingly, it operates a strong Open Access Policy, providing immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

via cearta.ie » New Open Source Law Journal.

So what’s in the first edition? Here’s the (very interesting) table of contents:

Foreword and statement of purpose: an introduction to IFOSS L. Rev., Iain G Mitchell QC

Articles

• The Fiduciary Licence Agreement: Appointing legal guardians for Free Software Projects, Ywein Van den Brande
• Collaborative Approach: Peer-to-Patent and the Open Source Movement, Christopher Wong, Jason Kreps
• Bad Facts Make Good Law: The Jacobsen Case and Open Source, Lawrence Rosen
• Introducing The Risk Grid, Shane Martin Coughlan, Andrew Katz

Case Law Reports

• Jacobsen v Katzer and Kamind Associates – an English legal perspective, Mark Henley

Book reviews

• ‘Open Source Technology and Policy’ by Fadi P. Deek and James A.M. McHugh, Andrew Katz

Tech Watch

• Tech Watch, Adriaan de Groot

Platform

• Collaboration Among Counsel Celebrating the Formation of a Community of Lawyers for the Advancement of Understanding of Free and Open Source Licensing and Business Models, Karen Faulds Copenhaver

This looks like a journal to watch going forward.

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It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

via Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

Jason Plant takes this idea and extends it to law firms: could a law firm really offer services for nothing?

Could we every get to the point that the knowledge systems in law firms become so good that a simple search could trawl thousands of precedents and cases in a firms KM (Knowledge Management) and DM (Document Management) systems and bring you back the agreements that could be used with virtually no partner/associate billable time. Meaning very low costs that could be covered elsewhere (e.g. by adverts)?

via Free! Why £0.00 Is the Future of Business.

A little more background on the concept provides more context. So, first Chris Anderson notes the powerful difference from the consumer perspective between free and cheap:

From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

Chris also points out that “free” does not mean that someone, somewhere isn’t making money — advertiser-support Web sites are a key example of this:

Traditionalists wring their hands about the “vaporization of value” and “demonetization” of entire industries.… But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they’re distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.

I do not believe that the lengthening economic recession has not proven any of this wrong, although more and more businesses are struggling to find ways to fund the very real costs that exist. Even if marginal costs per user are still dropping towards zero, servers, bandwidth, and storage still cost the provider real money. Yet, consumers appear even more price conscious today, and paying anything at all can seem like too much. The short-term challenge for many companies is to survive when third-party funders are harder to find, and customers are shy about paying for anything. Perhaps as consumers see companies with services they value go out of business, the massive gap between “free” and “cheap, but nor free” will lessen — but I wouldn’t count on it.

Back in the legal world, however, it is more of a stretch to me to imagine how this would work. Certainly it is possible that Jason’s Knowledge Management services may well make simple legal queries cheaper. Even now, self-help legal Web sites have grown beyond what was ever available previously, and open-access legal search makes case law increasingly accessible to everyone (in a technical sense, anyway). Technology will increasingly make routine legal matters — wills, real estate conveyances, simple contracts — possible to handle without a lawyer, or without paying a lawyer a great deal of money.

But while I suspect these services might extend legal access (“access to justice,” as it’s termed), I am not convinced that it will undercut the legal market as a whole, at least not in the short-to-medium term — not until human intelligence is significantly replaceable by artificial means. Thus, services based on human input, creativity, and analysis will be the last outpost of replaceability. For example, musicians have not been replaced. Humans still need to create original music. It is the distribution model that has changed.

Distribution, as the music industry has found, is subject to technological replacement. Similarly, distribution of legal services is already undergoing changes, as “virtual law offices” emerge, and some services are even outsourced to other countries. Barriers — bar membership requirements for example — might make this challenging, but those are, in a sense, artificial barriers, as are copyright laws.

This, musicians can still earn money for in-person concerts, where it is impossible to replicate the human element. The same will continue to be true for attorneys. But distribution of legal analysis, as with music, will change.

There are key differences, though: music does not require modification based on context, while legal analysis is incredibly fact and jurisdiction specific. So distribution will get cheaper, but marginal costs — due to modifications and application — will not drop as much in law as in music. Still, “freemium” business models, or models where third parties pay, may well be extensible to legal services. For example, firms perhaps could provide simple wills and contracts for free, and charge for customization. Legal analysis in a broad sense could also be free — but you need to pay us to apply it to your facts (is this not what legal blogs are doing now?).

So lawyers are safer than musicians in this sense — but nonetheless technology will revolutionize legal services, and law firms that adapt to the ideas behind “free” as a business model will survive and prosper — those that fail to adapt will not.

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