Terms of Service Contracts for Peer Production

Description

David Bollier:

"Many websites use self-serving “contracts of adhesion” in their Terms of Service (ToS) as a way to impose their own one-sided terms of usage while formally abiding by the premises of contract law (a mutually negotiated set of legal terms that bind both parties). But what if a ToS, instead asserting strict proprietary rights for business purposes, legally authorized and required peer sharing among users of the website? Such a ToS would assert legal terms for automatic access, use and sharing of collectively “owned” digital resources, perhaps with customizable options for specific needs. This Peer Production ToS is now being developed by Intrinsic, [1] a startup company that is building an open-source architecture for online collaboration."