مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Let’s get legal While the term ‘crowdsourcing’ may be relatively new, the practice of outsourcing an organizational activity to a crowd has been around for centuries. The Australian flag and the marine chronometer that Captain James Cook used to navigate the Australian coastline were both products of crowdsourcing. Toyota also crowdsourced its logo in 1936, with the winner chosen from 27,000 submissions (Morozov, 2014).

The internet and social media have brought crowdsourcing into the 21st century by facilitating access to hundreds of millions of potential participants (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). Consequently, crowdsourcing today has been defined as an ‘‘online, distributed, problem-solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities to serve specific organizational goals’’ (Brabham, 2013, p. xix). Organizations employ crowdsourcing to construct, assimilate, and harness crowd capitalthatis used to (Prpic´, Shukla, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2015): Make decisions between known choices (crowd voting); Undertake small jobs (microtask crowdsourcing); and Innovate and solve problems (crowdsourcing solutions).

While the legal aspects of crowdsourcing can be diverse–—involving tax, investment, and employment law–—we focus specifically on the intellectual property issues that arise when crowdsourcing solutions. An understanding of the legal considerations surrounding intellectual property is crucial to leverage the crowd successfully and safely in search of innovative solutions.