A new web-based experiment is being undertaken by Creative Commons’ Chairman, Lawrence Lessig. In 1999, Professor Lessig wrote Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, he realized that Code needed an update, so he opened it up to the world to help. Using wiki technologies provided by JotSpot, you, or anyone else can contribute updates to Code.

Once the the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of the wiki and ready 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.

An excerpts from the site:

In the six years since its first publication, cyberspace has evolved to the point where Code now needs an update. In the five years since Code v.1, cyberspace has also evolved to enable new forms of digital creativity. In applying these new tools to the now-old text, we’re harnessing the knowledge, creativity, and experience of the community, hopefully to build a better update than could have been done alone. This type of project was not possible until very recently: it is an experiment in technology and collaborative creativity. We’re excited to see what happens.

This project also debuts the beta release of a newly branded Wiki license. The license works like Attribution-ShareAlike, however, attribution can be set to the wiki, in this case Code v.2 Wiki, rather than each individual author.

We’ve made this slight modification to the attribution clause in this beta version, and used it for this wiki, but we won’t release the license generally till we’ve had the ordinary time for discussion.