Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks - User contributions [en]

A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 4

2007-08-19T13:32:32Z

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<big>'''''Capítulo 4 - A Economia da Produção Social'''''</big>

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==Motivação==
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==Produção Social:Praticabilidade, condições e forma organizacional==
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"Modularidade" é uma propriedade que descreve o quanto um projeto pode ser dividido em componentes menores, ou módulos, que podem ser produzidos independentemente antes de serem unidos. Se os módulos são independentes, contribuidores individuais podem escolher o que e quando irão contribuir sem depender de outros contribuidores. Isto aumenta a autonomia dos contribuidores e a flexibilidade com que podem definir a extensão, natureza e tempo de dedicação de sua participação no projeto.

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Talk:Acknowledgments

2007-08-19T13:30:57Z

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Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks:Community Portal

2007-08-19T13:29:09Z

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==Welcome to the Wealth of Networks Wiki Community==

: Contribute your thoughts, ideas and observations on this evolving Wiki community here.

: Please share some information - and links - about the networked information communities with which you are involved.

: Share your visions as to how this site can serve as a catalyst for The Wealth of Networks Wiki community.

=== References in the book? ===

Where is the right place in this wiki to ask or comment about references in the book?

: Probably in a page that doesn't yet exist titled [[Bibliography]] - or [[Annotated Bibliogrpahy]], into which would eventually need to be gathered all the bibliographic references from the Notes in The Wealth of Networks, suitably organized and with space for comments. In the meantime, probably this page is as good a place as any to share your comments or questions, which are very welcome.

=== Spanish translation ===

: I have posted in my blog http://gruizlegal.blogspot.com/ the spanish translation of Chapter 12 of Benkler's book.

=== Wiki Spam ===

: I noticed in the recent edits that the Wealth of Networks Wiki were page reverts for WikiSpam (reference to follow). I have seen some fairly effective prevention techniques for decreasing its frequency. The spammers and such cannot be allowed to win. [[User:Kchswince|Kchswince]]

:: I would be very happy to see such techniques implemented here. [[User: Grandpa Ruh|Grandpa Ruh]]

User talk:Kchswince

2007-08-19T13:27:11Z

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==Wiki spam==

I was glad to see your contribution on the Community portal page on the issue of '''Wiki spam''', as this is something I have wanted to see for some time - and that touches on broader concerns I have re accountability and acceptance of clear guidelines - i.e. agreement to terms of participation in Wiki spaces.

I am looking forward to seeing the references you mentioned on preventing or curtailing Wiki spam.

In peace

[[User:Grandpa Ruh|gr]] 14:06, 7 October 2006 (PDT)

User:FranzNahrada

2007-08-19T13:25:29Z

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I am Franz Nahrada from Vienna and I am very delighted about this book. I am doing an online excerpt for a speech in Rome promoting the ideas together with some similar ideas:

http://www.globalvillages.info/wiki.cgi?GlobalVillages/FranzNahrada/Workspace/RomeSpeech

Talk:3. Peer Production and Sharing

2007-08-19T13:24:55Z

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== quibble with an example ==

It's said in the book that cars, unlike railcars, can use a commons-based infrastructure which they can share, instead of an owned and managed infrastructure. In actuality, both roads and railroads are equivalent in this respect, and the way they are implemented does not seem to me to heavily depend on their essential characteristics but on tradition and policy decisions. Railroads must be built and rules of their use established, whether by private parties or the state depends on the country, and so do roads.
[[User:Modulus|modulus]] 07:53, 18 April 2006 (PDT)

User:Longbow4u

2007-08-19T13:22:44Z

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Wikipedian

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Longbow4u Longbow4u]

Yochai Benkler

2007-08-19T13:21:37Z

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==The guy who wrote the book==

== See also ==
[[User_talk:Yochai]]

== External links ==
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yochai_Benkler Wikipedia:Yochai Benkler]

Chapter 1

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge|Chapter 1 Summary]] [[Bulleted Chapter 1]] | [[Talk:Chapter 1|Discuss Chapter 1]]

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== Chapter 1 Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge ==

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

A series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.

The rise of greater scope for individual and cooperative nonmarket production of information and culture, however, threatens the incumbents of the industrial information economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. A wide range of laws and institutions-from broad areas like telecommunications, copyright, or international trade regulation, to minutiae like the rules for registering domain names or whether digital television receivers will be required by law to recognize a particular code-are being tugged and warped in efforts to tilt the playing field toward one way of doing things or the other. How these battles turn out over the next decade or so will likely have a significant effect on how we come to know what is going on in the world we occupy, and to what extent and in what forms we will be able-as autonomous individuals, as citizens, and as participants in cultures and communities-to affect how we and others see the world as it is and as it might be.

=== The Emergence of the Networked Information Economy ===

The most advanced economies in the world today have made two parallel shifts that, paradoxically, make possible a significant attenuation of the limitations that market-based production places on the pursuit of the political values central to liberal societies. The first move, in the making for more than a century, is to an economy centered on information (financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the manipulation of symbols (from making sneakers to branding them and manufacturing the cultural significance of the Swoosh). The second is the move to a communications environment built on cheap processors with high computation capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive network-the phenomenon we associate with the Internet. It is this second shift that allows for an increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was true of this sector in the twentieth century. The first shift means that these new patterns of production-nonmarket and radically decentralized-will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies. It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and market-based production, than they ever have in modern democracies.

The first part of this book is dedicated to establishing a number of basic economic observations. Its overarching claim is that we are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the "networked information economy." It is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action-specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies-plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy. The catalyst for this change is the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, and its ripple effects throughout the technologies of communication and storage. The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population-on the order of a billion people around the globe. The core distinguishing feature of communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth century was that effective communication spanning the ever-larger societies and geographies that came to make up the relevant political and economic units of the day required ever-larger investments of physical capital. Large-circulation mechanical presses, the telegraph system, powerful radio and later television transmitters, cable and satellite, and the mainframe computer became necessary to make information and communicate it on scales that went beyond the very local. Wanting to communicate with others was not a sufficient condition to being able to do so. As a result, information and cultural production took on, over the course of this period, a more industrial model than the economics of information itself would have required. The rise of the networked, computer-mediated communications environment has changed this basic fact. The material requirements for effective information production and communication are now owned by numbers of individuals several orders of magnitude larger than the number of owners of the basic means of information production and exchange a mere two decades ago.

The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy. These have quite different characteristics than coal, steel, and manual human labor, which characterized the industrial economy and structured our basic thinking about economic production for the past century. They lead to three observations about the emerging information production system. First, nonproprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of steel or automobiles, even when the economics of communication weighed in favor of industrial models. Education, arts and sciences, political debate, and theological disputation have always been much more importantly infused with nonmarket motivations and actors than, say, the automobile industry. As the material barrier that ultimately nonetheless drove much of our information environment to be funneled through the proprietary, market-based strategies is removed, these basic nonmarket, nonproprietary, motivations and organizational forms should in principle become even more important to the information production system.

Second, we have in fact seen the rise of nonmarket production to much greater importance. Individuals can reach and inform or edify millions around the world. Such a reach was simply unavailable to diversely motivated individuals before, unless they funneled their efforts through either market organizations or philanthropically or state-funded efforts. The fact that every such effort is available to anyone connected to the network, from anywhere, has led to the emergence of coordinate effects, where the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative, produces the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment. One needs only to run a Google search on any subject of interest to see how the "information good" that is the response to one's query is produced by the coordinate effects of the uncoordinated actions of a wide and diverse range of individuals and organizations acting on a wide range of motivations-both market and nonmarket, state-based and nonstate.

Third, and likely most radical, new, and difficult for observers to believe, is the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts-peer production of information, knowledge, and culture. These are typified by the emergence of free and open-source software. We are beginning to see the expansion of this model not only to our core software platforms, but beyond them into every domain of information and cultural production-and this book visits these in many different domains-from peer production of encyclopedias, to news and commentary, to immersive entertainment.

It is easy to miss these changes. They run against the grain of some of our most basic Economics 101 intuitions, intuitions honed in the industrial economy at a time when the only serious alternative seen was state Communism-an alternative almost universally considered unattractive today. The undeniable economic success of free software has prompted some leading-edge economists to try to understand why many thousands of loosely networked free software developers can compete with Microsoft at its own game and produce a massive operating system-GNU/Linux. That growing literature, consistent with its own goals, has focused on software and the particulars of the free and open-source software development communities, although Eric von Hippel's notion of "user-driven innovation" has begun to expand that focus to thinking about how individual need and creativity drive innovation at the individual level, and its diffusion through networks of like-minded individuals. The political implications of free software have been central to the free software movement and its founder, Richard Stallman, and were developed provocatively and with great insight by Eben Moglen. Free software is but one salient example of a much broader phenomenon. Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? Why do 4.5 million volunteers contribute their leftover computer cycles to create the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, SETI@Home? Without a broadly accepted analytic model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities, perhaps transient fads, possibly of significance in one market segment or another. We should try instead to see them for what they are: a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world-those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles.

Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness. There is nothing new or earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists. In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial information economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuable and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital requirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn, oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a production and organizational strategy that could justify the investments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward market production. In state-run economies, that meant orienting production toward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of production.

In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal computers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean that they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease to seek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that whenever someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, and ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to make something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network connection, he or she can do so-alone, or in cooperation with others. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so; if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individuals acting for complementary reasons. The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system. Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail, these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and can allow creative people to work on information projects more efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations. The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own.

Because the presence and importance of nonmarket production has become so counterintuitive to people living in market-based economies at the end of the twentieth century, part I of this volume is fairly detailed and technical; overcoming what we intuitively "know" requires disciplined analysis. Readers who are not inclined toward economic analysis should at least read the introduction to part I, the segments entitled "When Information Production Meets the Computer Network" and "Diversity of Strategies in our Current Production System" in chapter 2, and the case studies in chapter 3. These should provide enough of an intuitive feel for what I mean by the diversity of production strategies for information and the emergence of nonmarket individual and cooperative production, to serve as the basis for the more normatively oriented parts of the book. Readers who are genuinely skeptical of the possibility that nonmarket production is sustainable and effective, and in many cases is an efficient strategy for information, knowledge, and cultural production, should take the time to read part I in its entirety. The emergence of precisely this possibility and practice lies at the very heart of my claims about the ways in which liberal commitments are translated into lived experiences in the networked environment, and forms the factual foundation of the political-theoretical and the institutional-legal discussion that occupies the remainder of the book.

=== Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies ===

How we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others speak to us are core components of the shape of freedom in any society. Part II of this book provides a detailed look at how the changes in the technological, economic, and social affordances of the networked information environment affect a series of core commitments of a wide range of liberal democracies. The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies-individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice. These values provide the vectors of political morality along which the shape and dimensions of any liberal society can be plotted. Because their practical policy implications are often contradictory, rather than complementary, the pursuit of each places certain limits on how we pursue the others, leading different liberal societies to respect them in different patterns. How much a society constrains the democratic decision-making powers of the majority in favor of individual freedom, or to what extent it pursues social justice, have always been attributes that define the political contours and nature of that society. But the economics of industrial production, and our pursuit of productivity and growth, have imposed a limit on how we can pursue any mix of arrangements to implement our commitments to freedom and justice. Singapore is commonly trotted out as an extreme example of the trade-off of freedom for welfare, but all democracies with advanced capitalist economies have made some such trade-off. Predictions of how well we will be able to feed ourselves are always an important consideration in thinking about whether, for example, to democratize wheat production or make it more egalitarian. Efforts to push workplace democracy have also often foundered on the shoals-real or imagined-of these limits, as have many plans for redistribution in the name of social justice. Market-based, proprietary production has often seemed simply too productive to tinker with. The emergence of the networked information economy promises to expand the horizons of the feasible in political imagination. Different liberal polities can pursue different mixtures of respect for different liberal commitments. However, the overarching constraint represented by the seeming necessity of the industrial model of information and cultural production has significantly shifted as an effective constraint on the pursuit of liberal commitments.

==== Enhanced Autonomy ====

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

I begin, therefore, with an analysis of the effects of networked information economy on individual autonomy. First, individuals can do more for themselves independently of the permission or cooperation of others. They can create their own expressions, and they can seek out the information they need, with substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century. Second, and no less importantly, individuals can do more in loose affiliation with others, rather than requiring stable, long-term relations, like coworker relations or participation in formal organizations, to underwrite effective cooperation. Very few individuals living in the industrial information economy could, in any realistic sense, decide to build a new Library of Alexandria of global reach, or to start an encyclopedia. As collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore qualitatively increases. The very fluidity and low commitment required of any given cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can conceive of as open to them.

These ways in which autonomy is enhanced require a fairly substantive and rich conception of autonomy as a practical lived experience, rather than the formal conception preferred by many who think of autonomy as a philosophical concept. But even from a narrower perspective, which spans a broader range of conceptions of autonomy, at a minimum we can say that individuals are less susceptible to manipulation by a legally defined class of others-the owners of communications infrastructure and media. The networked information economy provides varied alternative platforms for communication, so that it moderates the power of the traditional mass-media model, where ownership of the means of communication enables an owner to select what others view, and thereby to affect their perceptions of what they can and cannot do. Moreover, the diversity of perspectives on the way the world is and the way it could be for any given individual is qualitatively increased. This gives individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make.

==== Democracy: The Networked Public Sphere ====

The second major implication of the networked information economy is the shift it enables from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. This shift is also based on the increasing freedom individuals enjoy to participate in creating information and knowledge, and the possibilities it presents for a new public sphere to emerge alongside the commercial, mass-media markets. The idea that the Internet democratizes is hardly new. It has been a staple of writing about the Internet since the early 1990s. The relatively simple first-generation claims about the liberating effects of the Internet, summarized in the U.S. Supreme Court's celebration of its potential to make everyone a pamphleteer, came under a variety of criticisms and attacks over the course of the past half decade or so. Here, I offer a detailed analysis of how the emergence of a networked information economy in particular, as an alternative to mass media, improves the political public sphere. The first-generation critique of the democratizing effect of the Internet was based on various implications of the problem of information overload, or the Babel objection. According to the Babel objection, when everyone can speak, no one can be heard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to the reemergence of money as the distinguishing factor between statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity. The second-generation critique was that the Internet is not as decentralized as we thought in the 1990s. The emerging patterns of Internet use show that very few sites capture an exceedingly large amount of attention, and millions of sites go unnoticed. In this world, the Babel objection is perhaps avoided, but only at the expense of the very promise of the Internet as a democratic medium.

In chapters 6 and 7, I offer a detailed and updated analysis of this, perhaps the best-known and most contentious claim about the Internet's liberalizing effects. First, it is important to understand that any consideration of the democratizing effects of the Internet must measure its effects as compared to the commercial, mass-media-based public sphere, not as compared to an idealized utopia that we embraced a decade ago of how the Internet might be. Commercial mass media that have dominated the public spheres of all modern democracies have been studied extensively. They have been shown in extensive literature to exhibit a series of failures as platforms for public discourse. First, they provide a relatively limited intake basin-that is, too many observations and concerns of too many people in complex modern societies are left unobserved and unattended to by the small cadre of commercial journalists charged with perceiving the range of issues of public concern in any given society. Second, particularly where the market is concentrated, they give their owners inordinate power to shape opinion and information. This power they can either use themselves or sell to the highest bidder. And third, whenever the owners of commercial media choose not to exercise their power in this way, they then tend to program toward the inane and soothing, rather than toward that which will be politically engaging, and they tend to oversimplify complex public discussions. On the background of these limitations of the mass media, I suggest that the networked public sphere enables many more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media.

The empirical and theoretical literature about network topology and use provides answers to all the major critiques of the claim that the Internet improves the structure of the public sphere. In particular, I show how a wide range of mechanisms-starting from the simple mailing list, through static Web pages, the emergence of writable Web capabilities, and mobility-are being embedded in a social system for the collection of politically salient information, observations, and comments, and provide a platform for discourse. These platforms solve some of the basic limitations of the commercial, concentrated mass media as the core platform of the public sphere in contemporary complex democracies. They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes-the eyes of someone who could actually inject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive, and thus more engaged observers of social spaces that could potentially become subjects for political conversation; they become more engaged participants in the debates about their observations. The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization. We are seeing the emergence of new, decentralized approaches to fulfilling the watchdog function and to engaging in political debate and organization. These are being undertaken in a distinctly nonmarket form, in ways that would have been much more difficult to pursue effectively, as a standard part of the construction of the public sphere, before the networked information environment. Working through detailed examples, I try to render the optimism about the democratic advantages of the networked public sphere a fully specified argument.

The networked public sphere has also begun to respond to the information overload problem, but without re-creating the power of mass media at the points of filtering and accreditation. There are two core elements to these developments: First, we are beginning to see the emergence of nonmarket, peer-produced alternative sources of filtration and accreditation in place of the market-based alternatives. Relevance and accreditation are themselves information goods, just like software or an encyclopedia. What we are seeing on the network is that filtering for both relevance and accreditation has become the object of widespread practices of mutual pointing, of peer review, of pointing to original sources of claims, and its complement, the social practice that those who have some ability to evaluate the claims in fact do comment on them. The second element is a contingent but empirically confirmed observation of how users actually use the network. As a descriptive matter, information flow in the network is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the cacophony of information flow would suggest, and significantly less centralized than the mass media environment was. Some sites are much more visible and widely read than others. This is true both when one looks at the Web as a whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who tend to cluster. Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media-the dominance of the few visible sites. But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the mass-media-dominated public sphere. Sites cluster around communities of interest: Australian fire brigades tend to link to other Australian fire brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and to a lesser but still significant extent, to liberal political blogs. In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone. "Local" clusters-communities of interest-can provide initial vetting and "peer-review-like" qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster. Observations that are seen as significant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger ("regional") clusters. This continues until an observation makes its way to the "superstar" sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use. This path is complemented by the practice of relatively easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which creates shortcuts to wide attention. It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively why these patterns might emerge. Users tend to treat other people's choices about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for them. They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their own as to whether certain types of users-say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a specific television program-are the best predictors of what will be interesting for them. The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly.

==== Justice and Human Development ====

Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development. Because the outputs of the networked information economy are usually nonproprietary, it provides free access to a set of the basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity and the basic outputs of the information economy. From a liberal perspective concerned with justice, at a minimum, these outputs become more readily available as "finished goods" to those who are least well off. More importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating in the economy less dependent on surmounting access barriers to financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity.

From a more substantive and global perspective focused on human development, the freedom to use basic resources and capabilities allows improved participation in the production of information and information-dependent components of human development. First, and currently most advanced, the emergence of a broad range of free software utilities makes it easier for poor and middle-income countries to obtain core software capabilities. More importantly, free software enables the emergence of local capabilities to provide software services, both for national uses and as a basis for participating in a global software services industry, without need to rely on permission from multinational software companies. Scientific publication is beginning to use commons-based strategies to publish important sources of information in a way that makes the outputs freely available in poorer countries. More ambitiously, we begin to see in agricultural research a combined effort of public, nonprofit, and open-source-like efforts being developed and applied to problems of agricultural innovation. The ultimate purpose is to develop a set of basic capabilities that would allow collaboration among farmers and scientists, in both poor countries and around the globe, to develop better, more nutritious crops to improve food security throughout the poorer regions of the world. Equally ambitious, but less operationally advanced, we are beginning to see early efforts to translate this system of innovation to health-related products.

All these efforts are aimed at solving one of the most glaring problems of poverty and poor human development in the global information economy: Even as opulence increases in the wealthier economies-as information and innovation offer longer and healthier lives that are enriched by better access to information, knowledge, and culture-in many places, life expectancy is decreasing, morbidity is increasing, and illiteracy remains rampant. Some, although by no means all, of this global injustice is due to the fact that we have come to rely ever-more exclusively on proprietary business models of the industrial economy to provide some of the most basic information components of human development. As the networked information economy develops new ways of producing information, whose outputs are not treated as proprietary and exclusive but can be made available freely to everyone, it offers modest but meaningful opportunities for improving human development everywhere. We are seeing early signs of the emergence of an innovation ecosystem made of public funding, traditional nonprofits, and the newly emerging sector of peer production that is making it possible to advance human development through cooperative efforts in both rich countries and poor.

==== A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations ====

The networked information economy also allows for the emergence of a more critical and self-reflective culture. In the past decade, a number of legal scholars-Niva Elkin Koren, Terry Fisher, Larry Lessig, and Jack Balkin-have begun to examine how the Internet democratizes culture. Following this work and rooted in the deliberative strand of democratic theory, I suggest that the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable. Together, these mean that we are seeing the emergence of a new folk culture-a practice that has been largely suppressed in the industrial era of cultural production-where many more of us participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world around us. These practices make their practitioners better "readers" of their own culture and more self-reflective and critical of the culture they occupy, thereby enabling them to become more self-reflective participants in conversations within that culture. This also allows individuals much greater freedom to participate in tugging and pulling at the cultural creations of others, "glomming on" to them, as Balkin puts it, and making the culture they occupy more their own than was possible with mass-media culture. In these senses, we can say that culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory.

Throughout much of this book, I underscore the increased capabilities of individuals as the core driving social force behind the networked information economy. This heightened individual capacity has raised concerns by many that the Internet further fragments community, continuing the long trend of industrialization. A substantial body of empirical literature suggests, however, that we are in fact using the Internet largely at the expense of television, and that this exchange is a good one from the perspective of social ties. We use the Internet to keep in touch with family and intimate friends, both geographically proximate and distant. To the extent we do see a shift in social ties, it is because, in addition to strengthening our strong bonds, we are also increasing the range and diversity of weaker connections. Following Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman, I suggest that we have become more adept at filling some of the same emotional and context-generating functions that have traditionally been associated with the importance of community with a network of overlapping social ties that are limited in duration or intensity.

=== Four Methodological Comments ===

There are four methodological choices represented by the thesis that I have outlined up to this point, and therefore in this book as a whole, which require explication and defense. The first is that I assign a very significant role to technology. The second is that I offer an explanation centered on social relations, but operating in the domain of economics, rather than sociology. The third and fourth are more internal to liberal political theory. The third is that I am offering a liberal political theory, but taking a path that has usually been resisted in that literature-considering economic structure and the limits of the market and its supporting institutions from the perspective of freedom, rather than accepting the market as it is, and defending or criticizing adjustments through the lens of distributive justice. Fourth, my approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy. Just like the market, the state will have to adjust to this new emerging modality of human action. Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise.

==== The Role of Technology in Human Affairs ====

The first methodological choice concerns how one should treat the role of technology in the development of human affairs. The kind of technological determinism that typified Lewis Mumford, or, specifically in the area of communications, Marshall McLuhan, is widely perceived in academia today as being too deterministic, though perhaps not so in popular culture. The contemporary effort to offer more nuanced, institution-based, and political-choice-based explanations is perhaps best typified by Paul Starr's recent and excellent work on the creation of the media. While these contemporary efforts are indeed powerful, one should not confuse a work like Elizabeth Eisenstein's carefully argued and detailed The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, with McLuhan's determinism. Assuming that technologies are just tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do. Barry Wellman has imported into sociology a term borrowed from engineering-affordances./1 Langdon Winner called these the "political properties" of technologies./2 An earlier version of this idea is Harold Innis's concept of "the bias of communications."/3 In Internet law and policy debates this approach has become widely adopted through the influential work of Lawrence Lessig, who characterized it as "code is law."/4

The idea is simple to explain, and distinct from a naïve determinism. Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense-if you have technology "t," you should expect social structure or relation "s" to emerge-is false. Ocean navigation had a different adoption and use when introduced in states whose land empire ambitions were effectively countered by strong neighbors-like Spain and Portugal-than in nations that were focused on building a vast inland empire, like China. Print had different effects on literacy in countries where religion encouraged individual reading-like Prussia, Scotland, England, and New England-than where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain. This form of understanding the role of technology is adopted here. Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. In a challenging environment-be the challenges natural or human-it can make some behaviors obsolete by increasing the efficacy of directly competitive strategies. However, within the realm of the feasible-uses not rendered impossible by the adoption or rejection of a technology-different patterns of adoption and use can result in very different social relations that emerge around a technology. Unless these patterns are in competition, or unless even in competition they are not catastrophically less effective at meeting the challenges, different societies can persist with different patterns of use over long periods. It is the feasibility of long-term sustainability of different patterns of use that makes this book relevant to policy, not purely to theory. The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.

==== The Role of Economic Analysis and Methodological Individualism ====

It should be emphasized, as the second point, that this book has a descriptive methodology that is distinctly individualist and economic in orientation, which is hardly the only way to approach this problem. Manuel Castells's magisterial treatment of the networked society/5 locates its central characteristic in the shift from groups and hierarchies to networks as social and organizational models-looser, flexible arrangements of human affairs. Castells develops this theory as he describes a wide range of changes, from transportation networks to globalization and industrialization. In his work, the Internet fits into this trend, enabling better coordination and cooperation in these sorts of loosely affiliated networks. My own emphasis is on the specific relative roles of market and nonmarket sectors, and how that change anchors the radical decentralization that he too observes, as a matter of sociological observation. I place at the core of the shift the technical and economic characteristics of computer networks and information. These provide the pivot for the shift toward radical decentralization of production. They underlie the shift from an information environment dominated by proprietary, market-oriented action, to a world in which nonproprietary, nonmarket transactional frameworks play a large role alongside market production. This newly emerging, nonproprietary sector affects to a substantial degree the entire information environment in which individuals and societies live their lives. If there is one lesson we can learn from globalization and the ever-increasing reach of the market, it is that the logic of the market exerts enormous pressure on existing social structures. If we are indeed seeing the emergence of a substantial component of nonmarket production at the very core of our economic engine-the production and exchange of information, and through it of information-based goods, tools, services, and capabilities-then this change suggests a genuine limit on the extent of the market. Such a limit, growing from within the very market that it limits, in its most advanced loci, would represent a genuine shift in direction for what appeared to be the ever-increasing global reach of the market economy and society in the past half century.

==== Economic Structure in Liberal Political Theory ====

The third point has to do with the role of economic structure in liberal political theory. My analysis in this regard is practical and human centric. By this, I mean to say two things: First, I am concerned with human beings, with individuals as the bearers of moral claims regarding the structure of the political and economic systems they inhabit. Within the liberal tradition, the position I take is humanistic and general, as opposed to political and particular. It is concerned first and foremost with the claims of human beings as human beings, rather than with the requirements of democracy or the entitlements of citizenship or membership in a legitimate or meaningfully self-governed political community. There are diverse ways of respecting the basic claims of human freedom, dignity, and well-being. Different liberal polities do so with different mixes of constitutional and policy practices. The rise of global information economic structures and relationships affects human beings everywhere. In some places, it complements democratic traditions. In others, it destabilizes constraints on liberty. An understanding of how we can think of this moment in terms of human freedom and development must transcend the particular traditions, both liberal and illiberal, of any single nation. The actual practice of freedom that we see emerging from the networked environment allows people to reach across national or social boundaries, across space and political division. It allows people to solve problems together in new associations that are outside the boundaries of formal, legal-political association. In this fluid social economic environment, the individual's claims provide a moral anchor for considering the structures of power and opportunity, of freedom and well-being. Furthermore, while it is often convenient and widely accepted to treat organizations or communities as legal entities, as "persons," they are not moral agents. Their role in an analysis of freedom and justice is derivative from their role-both enabling and constraining-as structuring context in which human beings, the actual moral agents of political economy, find themselves. In this regard, my positions here are decidedly "liberal," as opposed to either communitarian or critical.

Second, I am concerned with actual human beings in actual historical settings, not with representations of human beings abstracted from their settings. These commitments mean that freedom and justice for historically situated individuals are measured from a first-person, practical perspective. No constraints on individual freedom and no sources of inequality are categorically exempt from review, nor are any considered privileged under this view. Neither economy nor cultural heritage is given independent moral weight. A person whose life and relations are fully regimented by external forces is unfree, no matter whether the source of regimentation can be understood as market-based, authoritarian, or traditional community values. This does not entail a radical anarchism or libertarianism. Organizations, communities, and other external structures are pervasively necessary for human beings to flourish and to act freely and effectively. This does mean, however, that I think of these structures only from the perspective of their effects on human beings. Their value is purely derivative from their importance to the actual human beings that inhabit them and are structured-for better or worse-by them. As a practical matter, this places concern with market structure and economic organization much closer to the core of questions of freedom than liberal theory usually is willing to do. Liberals have tended to leave the basic structure of property and markets either to libertarians-who, like Friedrich Hayek, accepted its present contours as "natural," and a core constituent element of freedom-or to Marxists and neo-Marxists. I treat property and markets as just one domain of human action, with affordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom along some dimensions, but their institutional requirements can become sources of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarket contexts. Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes central not only to the shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also to freedom.

==== Whither the State? ====

The fourth and last point emerges in various places throughout this book, but deserves explicit note here. What I find new and interesting about the networked information economy is the rise of individual practical capabilities, and the role that these new capabilities play in increasing the relative salience of nonproprietary, often nonmarket individual and social behavior. In my discussion of autonomy and democracy, of justice and a critical culture, I emphasize the rise of individual and cooperative private action and the relative decrease in the dominance of market-based and proprietary action. Where in all this is the state? For the most part, as you will see particularly in chapter 11, the state in both the United States and Europe has played a role in supporting the market-based industrial incumbents of the twentieth-century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the emerging networked information economy. Most state interventions have been in the form of either captured legislation catering to incumbents, or, at best, well-intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology for outdated modes of information and cultural production. In the traditional mapping of political theory, a position such as the one I present here-that freedom and justice can and should best be achieved by a combination of market action and private, voluntary (not to say charitable) nonmarket action, and that the state is a relatively suspect actor-is libertarian. Perhaps, given that I subject to similar criticism rules styled by their proponents as "property"-like "intellectual property" or "spectrum property rights"-it is anarchist, focused on the role of mutual aid and highly skeptical of the state. (It is quite fashionable nowadays to be libertarian, as it has been for a few decades, and more fashionable to be anarchist than it has been in a century.)

The more modest truth is that my position is not rooted in a theoretical skepticism about the state, but in a practical diagnosis of opportunities, barriers, and strategies for achieving improvements in human freedom and development given the actual conditions of technology, economy, and politics. I have no objection in principle to an effective, liberal state pursuing one of a range of liberal projects and commitments. Here and there throughout this book you will encounter instances where I suggest that the state could play constructive roles, if it stopped listening to incumbents for long enough to realize this. These include, for example, municipal funding of neutral broadband networks, state funding of basic research, and possible strategic regulatory interventions to negate monopoly control over essential resources in the digital environment. However, the necessity for the state's affirmative role is muted because of my diagnosis of the particular trajectory of markets, on the one hand, and individual and social action, on the other hand, in the digitally networked information environment. The particular economics of computation and communications; the particular economics of information, knowledge, and cultural production; and the relative role of information in contemporary, advanced economies have coalesced to make nonmarket individual and social action the most important domain of action in the furtherance of the core liberal commitments. Given these particular characteristics, there is more freedom to be found through opening up institutional spaces for voluntary individual and cooperative action than there is in intentional public action through the state. Nevertheless, I offer no particular reasons to resist many of the roles traditionally played by the liberal state. I offer no reason to think that, for example, education should stop being primarily a state-funded, public activity and a core responsibility of the liberal state, or that public health should not be so. I have every reason to think that the rise of nonmarket production enhances, rather than decreases, the justifiability of state funding for basic science and research, as the spillover effects of publicly funded information production can now be much greater and more effectively disseminated and used to enhance the general welfare.

The important new fact about the networked environment, however, is the efficacy and centrality of individual and collective social action. In most domains, freedom of action for individuals, alone and in loose cooperation with others, can achieve much of the liberal desiderata I consider throughout this book. From a global perspective, enabling individuals to act in this way also extends the benefits of liberalization across borders, increasing the capacities of individuals in nonliberal states to grab greater freedom than those who control their political systems would like. By contrast, as long as states in the most advanced market-based economies continue to try to optimize their institutional frameworks to support the incumbents of the industrial information economy, they tend to threaten rather than support liberal commitments. Once the networked information economy has stabilized and we come to understand the relative importance of voluntary private action outside of markets, the state can begin to adjust its policies to facilitate nonmarket action and to take advantage of its outputs to improve its own support for core liberal commitments.

=== The Stakes of It All: The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment ===

No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this technological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications-like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications services giants-to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made. None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocation lying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents' assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at stake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book. I offer no reassurances, however, that any of this will in fact come to pass.

The battle over the relative salience of the proprietary, industrial models of information production and exchange and the emerging networked information economy is being carried out in the domain of the institutional ecology of the digital environment. In a wide range of contexts, a similar set of institutional questions is being contested: To what extent will resources necessary for information production and exchange be governed as a commons, free for all to use and biased in their availability in favor of none? To what extent will these resources be entirely proprietary, and available only to those functioning within the market or within traditional forms of well-funded nonmarket action like the state and organized philanthropy? We see this battle played out at all layers of the information environment: the physical devices and network channels necessary to communicate; the existing information and cultural resources out of which new statements must be made; and the logical resources-the software and standards-necessary to translate what human beings want to say to each other into signals that machines can process and transmit. Its central question is whether there will, or will not, be a core common infrastructure that is governed as a commons and therefore available to anyone who wishes to participate in the networked information environment outside of the market-based, proprietary framework.

This is not to say that property is in some sense inherently bad. Property, together with contract, is the core institutional component of markets, and a core institutional element of liberal societies. It is what enables sellers to extract prices from buyers, and buyers to know that when they pay, they will be secure in their ability to use what they bought. It underlies our capacity to plan actions that require use of resources that, without exclusivity, would be unavailable for us to use. But property also constrains action. The rules of property are circumscribed and intended to elicit a particular datum-willingness and ability to pay for exclusive control over a resource. They constrain what one person or another can do with regard to a resource; that is, use it in some ways but not others, reveal or hide information with regard to it, and so forth. These constraints are necessary so that people must transact with each other through markets, rather than through force or social networks, but they do so at the expense of constraining action outside of the market to the extent that it depends on access to these resources.

Commons are another core institutional component of freedom of action in free societies, but they are structured to enable action that is not based on exclusive control over the resources necessary for action. For example, I can plan an outdoor party with some degree of certainty by renting a private garden or beach, through the property system. Alternatively, I can plan to meet my friends on a public beach or at Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. I can buy an easement from my neighbor to reach a nearby river, or I can walk around her property using the public road that makes up our transportation commons. Each institutional framework-property and commons-allows for a certain freedom of action and a certain degree of predictability of access to resources. Their complementary coexistence and relative salience as institutional frameworks for action determine the relative reach of the market and the domain of nonmarket action, both individual and social, in the resources they govern and the activities that depend on access to those resources. Now that material conditions have enabled the emergence of greater scope for nonmarket action, the scope and existence of a core common infrastructure that includes the basic resources necessary to produce and exchange information will shape the degree to which individuals will be able to act in all the ways that I describe as central to the emergence of a networked information economy and the freedoms it makes possible.

At the physical layer, the transition to broadband has been accompanied by a more concentrated market structure for physical wires and connections, and less regulation of the degree to which owners can control the flow of information on their networks. The emergence of open wireless networks, based on "spectrum commons," counteracts this trend to some extent, as does the current apparent business practice of broadband owners not to use their ownership to control the flow of information over their networks. Efforts to overcome the broadband market concentration through the development of municipal broadband networks are currently highly contested in legislation and courts. The single most threatening development at the physical layer has been an effort driven primarily by Hollywood, over the past few years, to require the manufacturers of computation devices to design their systems so as to enforce the copyright claims and permissions imposed by the owners of digital copyrighted works. Should this effort succeed, the core characteristic of computers-that they are general-purpose devices whose abilities can be configured and changed over time by their owners as uses and preferences change-will be abandoned in favor of machines that can be trusted to perform according to factory specifications, irrespective of what their owners wish. The primary reason that these laws have not yet passed, and are unlikely to pass, is that the computer hardware and software, and electronics and telecommunications industries all understand that such a law would undermine their innovation and creativity. At the logical layer, we are seeing a concerted effort, again headed primarily by Hollywood and the recording industry, to shape the software and standards to make sure that digitally encoded cultural products can continue to be sold as packaged goods. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the assault on peer-to-peer technologies are the most obvious in this regard.

More generally information, knowledge, and culture are being subjected to a second enclosure movement, as James Boyle has recently explored in depth. The freedom of action for individuals who wish to produce information, knowledge, and culture is being systematically curtailed in order to secure the economic returns demanded by the manufacturers of the industrial information economy. A rich literature in law has developed in response to this increasing enclosure over the past twenty years. It started with David Lange's evocative exploration of the public domain and Pamela Samuelson's prescient critique of the application of copyright to computer programs and digital materials, and continued through Jessica Litman's work on the public domain and digital copyright and Boyle's exploration of the basic romantic assumptions underlying our emerging "intellectual property" construct and the need for an environmentalist framework for preserving the public domain. It reached its most eloquent expression in Lawrence Lessig's arguments for the centrality of free exchange of ideas and information to our most creative endeavors, and his diagnoses of the destructive effects of the present enclosure movement. This growing skepticism among legal academics has been matched by a long-standing skepticism among economists (to which I devote much discussion in chapter 2). The lack of either analytic or empirical foundation for the regulatory drive toward ever-stronger proprietary rights has not, however, resulted in a transformed politics of the regulation of intellectual production. Only recently have we begun to see a politics of information policy and "intellectual property" emerge from a combination of popular politics among computer engineers, college students, and activists concerned with the global poor; a reorientation of traditional media advocates; and a very gradual realization by high-technology firms that rules pushed by Hollywood can impede the growth of computer-based businesses. This political countermovement is tied to quite basic characteristics of the technology of computer communications, and to the persistent and growing social practices of sharing-some, like p2p (peer-to-peer) file sharing, in direct opposition to proprietary claims; others, increasingly, are instances of the emerging practices of making information on nonproprietary models and of individuals sharing what they themselves made in social, rather than market patterns. These economic and social forces are pushing at each other in opposite directions, and each is trying to mold the legal environment to better accommodate its requirements. We still stand at a point where information production could be regulated so that, for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice.

Social and economic organization is not infinitely malleable. Neither is it always equally open to affirmative design. The actual practices of human interaction with information, knowledge, and culture and with production and consumption are the consequence of a feedback effect between social practices, economic organization, technological affordances, and formal constraints on behavior through law and similar institutional forms. These components of the constraints and affordances of human behavior tend to adapt dynamically to each other, so that the tension between the technological affordances, the social and economic practices, and the law are often not too great. During periods of stability, these components of the structure within which human beings live are mostly aligned and mutually reinforce each other, but the stability is subject to shock at any one of these dimensions. Sometimes shock can come in the form of economic crisis, as it did in the United States during the Great Depression. Often it can come from an external physical threat to social institutions, like a war. Sometimes, though probably rarely, it can come from law, as, some would argue, it came from the desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Sometimes it can come from technology; the introduction of print was such a perturbation, as was, surely, the steam engine. The introduction of the high-capacity mechanical presses and telegraph ushered in the era of mass media. The introduction of radio created a similar perturbation, which for a brief moment destabilized the mass-media model, but quickly converged to it. In each case, the period of perturbation offered more opportunities and greater risks than the periods of relative stability. During periods of perturbation, more of the ways in which society organizes itself are up for grabs; more can be renegotiated, as the various other components of human stability adjust to the changes. To borrow Stephen Jay Gould's term from evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of punctuated equilibria. The periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long. A mere twenty-five years passed between the invention of radio and its adaptation to the mass-media model. A similar period passed between the introduction of telephony and its adoption of the monopoly utility form that enabled only one-to-one limited communications. In each of these periods, various paths could have been taken. Radio showed us even within the past century how, in some societies, different paths were in fact taken and then sustained over decades. After a period of instability, however, the various elements of human behavioral constraint and affordances settled on a new stable alignment. During periods of stability, we can probably hope for little more than tinkering at the edges of the human condition.

This book is offered, then, as a challenge to contemporary liberal democracies. We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new environment will in some significant measure depend on policy choices that we make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice-a choice about how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and economic conditions. As economic policy, allowing yesterday's winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow's economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom, and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable.

===Footnotes===

1. Barry Wellman et al., "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," JCMC 8, no. 3 (April 2003).

2. Langdon Winner, ed., "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19-39.

3. Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Innis too is often lumped with McLuhan and Walter Ong as a technological determinist. His work was, however, one of a political economist, and he emphasized the relationship between technology and economic and social organization, much more than the deterministic operation of technology on human cognition and capability.

4. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

5. Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked Society (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

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Proceed to [[Chapter 2]]

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7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere

2007-08-19T13:18:50Z

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[[Table Of Contents]]

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_7.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 7|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]

==Summary of the chapter==

===Overview===
===Basic Tools of Networked Communication===
===Networked Information Economy Meets the Public Sphere===
===Critiques of the Claims that the Internet Has Democratizing Effects===
===Is the Internet too Chaotic, Too Concentrated, or Neither?===
===On Power Law Distributions, Network Topology, and Being Heard===
===Who Will Play the Watchdog Function?===
===Using Networked Communication to Work Around Authoritarian Control===
===Toward a Networked Public Sphere===

==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
===Other relevant readings===
==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===
===Counter-examples===
====Thoughts on Link Powerlaws and Blogs====

From The Conversational Middle: Maturing of the Blogosphere

Early on in the development of the Blogosphere, people like [http://shirky.com Clay Shirky] and Joi Ito saw how linking structures led to a powerlaw effect, where bloggers with the most links had more broadcast power than other bloggers, similar to traditional media forms.

Evidence of those kinds of linking patterns can be seen here at [http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000247.html the State of the Blogosphere report from October 2004], where counts for the NY Times and MSNBC were in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 thousand links, and top 100 bloggers like Boing Boing and Instapundit had 6 or so thousand links.

http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/bigmediavsblogs102004.jpg

At that point in time, [http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000356.html Technorati tracked 4 million blogs and 400 million links]. What has changed over the following year and a half is that the blogosphere has grown to where [http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000419.html Technorati tracks 33+ million blogs and 2.2 billion links]. As of January, 2006, the NY Times has 55,000+ inbound links and CNN has around 53,000+ but Boing Boing has 18,000+ and Instapundit has 5,600 links (they are no longer the number 2 blog, as that position is now held by Engadget at 15,600+ links) you can see that while the blogosphere has grown 7x and the links 5.5x, the inbound link counts of the top blogs and media has grown 3x.

http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/bigmediavsblogs022006.jpg

Also, take into account that Technorati changed its methods of link counting last August, 2005, after several things occurred: ([http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/14.html#a10642 Robert Scoble complained about its link counts in comparison to Bloglines] which counts every link since it started counting, [http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000500.html Mary Hodder reported on how link counting worked across 5 blog search services] as well as other's reports of frustration with the Top 100 and A-list counts where sparce posters' links were favored over frequent posters' links). So Technorati changed from counting just links on the top pages of a blog (those posts that linked but dropped off the front pages were dropped from front page link counts) to any link that had occurred in the past 6 months. Technorati still counts one link only per blog, no matter it's location on the blog posts or blogroll, no matter how many links come from one blog, but all link types age out after 6 months. So these statistics for the later time frame are different and not exactly comparable, but let's do it for the sake of argument here.

So, what does this mean? Well, since there are 5.5 times more links that occured over this 1.5 year time frame but fewer links occuring at the same rate to the top media properties (blogs and traditional media), it means that there are more links made to non-A-list bloggers than bloggers further down the [http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html power law curve]. These links are occuring at a higher rate in what could be called the "conversation middle of the power law curve" (the curve for link counts), than those A-listers at the top are receiving.

A year and a half ago, there was far more interest in the top of the power law, or the existence of the power law curve at all. The evidence now in the Spring of 2006, as the blogosphere goes main stream, it that the conversation and power is moving more to the middle, at least as link counts go, to more personal conversations rather than pointers to a few top media sites or the blogs that are act more like broadcasters. The broadcast model for blogs means that many more links go to a top blog, than they were able to link back to, because it was just physically impossible for a single blogger to link out to an equal number of that blogger's inbound links. Those top bloggers are 1-to-thousands in their distribution. So inbound links counts for those bloggers would have thousands of inbound links as opposed to far fewer outbound links to others.

From [http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html link February 2003, here is one distribution curve showing bloggers inbound link counts] in the Shirky article on power law curves:

http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/powerlawcurveforlinks022003.jpg

But the conversational middle theory, then, and now, is represented by a model of 12-to-12 for the distribution and receiving of links, or 50-to-50 at higher levels, or for larger blogs, maybe 500-to-200, depending on the size of the conversation verses those listening and linking back. And now the mainstreaming of the blogosphere supports this hypothesis a bit more.

As modified from [http://www.thelongtail.com/ Chris Anderson]'s [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html Long Tail article] here is a representation of what the conversational middle model:

http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/conversationalmiddle.jpg

Some bloggers have been frustrated by Technorati's link counting methods and particularly the [http://technorati.com/ Technorati Top 100], because they have felt that ranking across the entire blogosphere emphasized something that did not favor those further down the power law curve. Instead those kinds of link rank systems favored the topic blogging activities on tech stuff and politics, and bloggers on other topics and with other linking styles found [http://del.icio.us/tag/linklove there was a lot of interest] in figuring out ways to reveal topic communities lower down that power law curve.

The maturing of the blogosphere with less broadcast distribution and more conversation between people spread far and wide is even more subversive to tradtional media, and a more democratic way of bringing together people who want to discuss interests they have in common. Certainly there are still bloggers who are more highly read with more inbound links that resemble broadcasters in some ways, and who traditional media will consider to be more like themselves, but still, there is a shift to conversation with more symmetric linking patterns, and that is positive overall.

The next challenge is how to see how small conversational communities and the attendant tools that sift these conversations can use more than one or two digital gestures, like links and link counts, to create topic awareness of blogger groups with more than just the early adopter or blog-tool favoring metrics that post categories or tag indicators do now. These metrics too are subject to power law curves and the current uses of only one or two at a time still only reflect top bloggers, or early adopters, in these lists, just as link counts did before in emphasizing the top over the conversational middle. When the tools of exposure change, the conversational middle will become accessible and apparent not just to those in and around a particular conversation but to those outside it.

==Key Concepts==

==Future research considerations==

===Substantive effects on legislation===

Professor Benkler’s analysis focuses on how the Internet will change the “procedures” of politics – the mechanisms by which politicians and citizens will exchange and debate ideas. One interesting area for future study will be how the Internet will change the “substance” of politics – the policies enacted by government. Will the Internet shift politics to the left or to the right? What types of laws will be enacted as a result of the “new media” that would not have been enacted under the “old media”? Since the “new media” is, well, new, it is hard to empirically assess the answers to these questions, but one can speculate about the possibilities. Here are five such speculations (please contribute more!)

1. Greater emphasis on legislative protection of free speech

The Communications Decency Act passed in an era when there were far more Internet content consumers than content contributors. As more people contribute content to the Internet (consistent with Benkler’s vision), they will be more inclined against Internet censorship. More generally, as more people acquire the self-affirming ability to propagate their views, they may respect free speech to a greater extent and be less willing to deny it from others.

2. Better technology policy, such as copyright and patent law

In the mainstream media, those who create content (writers) tend to be different from those who are technologically adept (technicians). On the Internet, the content providers are the same as those with the underlying technological skills to put it online, and thus are perhaps more interested in technological issues. As a result, there may be more dialogue online than in the mainstream press on issues such as patents, telecommunications, and copyright. Anecdotally, the Grokster Supreme Court decision last year got as much blogosphere treatment as the Ten Commandments decisions – even though the Ten Commandments commanded (so to speak) much more mainstream media attention. Given that small interest groups currently drive copyright and patent policy because of the lack of broader public attention, increasing public discourse of these issues might have a salutary effect on technology policy.

3. Less pork

One of the reasons there is so much “pork” in congressional bills is that the “old media” does not have the expertise or interest to carefully evaluate these bills. As a result, the bills do not get any scrutiny, and Congressmen can feel free to insert these provisions without political recourse. The Diebold incident noted by Benkler demonstrates how the radically decentralized Internet can analyze complex issues in a way the old media cannot. Increased scrutiny on pork – leading to less pork – might be the result.

4. Decreased incumbency advantage leading to more populism.

Currently, 95+% of incumbents get reelected to the House of Representatives, in part because of the inherent cost of running political campaigns. The Internet undoubtedly makes it easier to advertise and run a political campaign. This might reduce the incumbency advantage, and might even lead to greater political populism as entrenched incumbents must directly appeal to voters.

5. Less prejudice against stigmatized groups

In the old media, people acquired information from two sources: first, from people they knew, and second, from TV or radio news anchors, whose physical appearances (in the case of TV), voices, and personal characteristics were calculated to appeal to as many people as possible. In contrast, when people read blogs, they do not see the faces, or hear the voices, of the bloggers. Frequently, the blogger is completely anonymous.

This might reduce prejudice against minority groups, both in politics and in daily life, in two ways. First, people uncomfortable around members of a minority group might be more willing to read a blog written by one, than watch one on TV or interact with one in real life. If they then find that the blog is appealing, it may implicitly reduce their prejudice toward people in those groups. Second, if they read a blog anonymously and then discover it is written by someone from a group which they stereotyped, their views toward that group might shift.

For instance, Andrew Sullivan is a gay conservative who wrote an influential blog in support of the Iraq war. Many people, especially in conservative states, might not know any gay people, and no gay person is likely to become a network TV news anchor anytime soon. Sullivan’s blog might thus have been their only opportunity to read and comment on the views of a gay intellectual. It’s possible that these interactions unconsciously reduced people’s hostility toward gay people.

===Thoughts on File-Sharing, Transnationally===

“Wealth of Networks” discusses in some depth the unique opportunities created by the internet for speech and collaboration, two vital ingredients to individual engagement with the political process. Americans generally regard the internet as a free and open space, but regulation of the internet could limit the utility of cyberspace for political activities. America and other nations have enjoined peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs such as Napster and Grokster under copyright infringement theories. These measures may restrict future activities and innovations important to political activism through the internet, yet it seems that few Americans have viewed the file-sharing decisions as more than just the prevention of music file exchange. This American attitude is not universal and is strongly influenced by several basic facts about American society: first, that America continues to experience a significant “digital divide,” and second, that America has a relatively mature democracy in which political activism is not widespread and internet freedoms are not closely associated with basic notions of political liberty. In contrast, South Korea has an unusually high rate of internet access and a relatively young democracy. We should expect that Korea will take a different and more permissive approach to its regulation of online file-sharing technologies.

America and Korea have both seen steady litigation over popular P2P file-sharing programs. In America, Napster, Aimster, and Grokster were all enjoined from distributing their programs by the courts. (A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1014 (9th Cir. 2001); In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, 334 F.3d 643 (7th Cir. 2003); Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 25 S.Ct. 2764, 2780 (2005))
Though the details of America’s regulatory regime for online file-sharing may be subject to change in the future, there seems to be little doubt that the United States will continue to regulate these programs and perhaps even stiffen punishments for file-sharing offenders. (See “Protecting Intellectual Rights against Theft and Appropriation Act,” http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=108_cong_bills&docid=f:s2237is.txt.)
In Korea, Soribada emerged as the most popular domestic file-sharing program. Despite lengthy and ongoing litigation, Soribada remains operational, though Soribada’s founders have chosen to limit its features. The United States has applied considerable pressure on the Korean government to follow its lead in the enforcement of IP copyright online, but Korea’s future regulation of P2P technologies remains in doubt. (The United States Trade Representative recently placed Korea on its intellectual property “watch list,” citing concerns about its protection of American popular music copyright interests. See USTR press release, available at http://seoul.usembassy.gov/e010804.html.)

Why do the United States and Korea differ, perhaps dramatically, in their prospects for future file-sharing regulation? As long as the American focus remains on free music, the debate will continue to center around the proximate question of copyright management. The imposition of civil and criminal penalties on file-sharers has a deeper significance in Korea because it raises the specter of oppressive government power infringing on the basic political liberty of citizens. In Korea, the internet is not just a resource regularly accessed by a bare majority of the society, but rather a part of everyday life for most Koreans. Due in part to the fact that Korea has the highest rate of internet access of any nation in the world, the internet is a major source of alternative news. (“Lessons from broadband development in Canada, Japan, Korea and the United States,” Frieden, Rob, Telecommunications Policy, Sept. 2005, Vol. 29(8), p. 595.) For instance, at the popular site OhmyNews, registered users, “news guerillas,” submit stories based on their actual experiences and observations, which collectively cover more events and a broader spectrum of opinions than are conveyed through Korea’s conservative mainstream news outlets. (Gillmor, Dan. We the Media, O’Reilly: Sebastopol, pp. 125-29.) The rise of the internet corresponds closely with the birth of Korean democracy; Korea has had an elected civilian government for only the last 13 years after decades of military dictatorships. The internet has been a political forum for much of the history of Korea’s still malleable democracy. Korea’s national elections have been meaningfully impacted by the prevalence of online access in Korea and the zeal with which Koreans have used cyberspace to participate in the political process. In 2002, underdog Korean presidential candidate Roh Moo-Hyun was narrowly elected in a campaign that was fueled not only by online fundraising, but by internet-facilitated brainstorming and the coalescence of politically motivated individuals in Korean society on the internet. (Gillmor at 93.)

The controversy surrounding Soribada may, at first glance, appear to be rather unrelated to Korean political democracy. However, restrictions on what programs can be provided to internet users, especially programs that foster networking and exchange, impose real limitations. The broad dissemination potential through P2P networks, which are established and viral communities, creates unique opportunities to contribute and share information and to shape the cultural context for political action. File-sharing can relate directly to politics as well. Professor Benkler discusses an apt American example: Diebold’s voting machines, used in numerous U.S. elections, were known by the company to malfunction; Benkler mentions that incriminating Diebold e-mails continued to circulate on P2P networks using eDonkey and BitTorrent even after the documents were removed from websites under the threat of legal action. (Wealth of Networks, Chapter 7, p. 230.) In America, this may be regarded as a rare counter-example to the “piracy” that has been found by American courts to illegitimatize several file-sharing programs. Korea, as a nascent democracy and the most “wired” nation in the world, may balance the costs and benefits of file-sharing regulations quite differently and may already value file-sharing technology as a fundamental part of the fabric of a free and politically engaged society.

Chapter 2, section 4

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<table width="650">
<tr valign="top">
<td>

[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation|Chapter 2: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 2, section 4|Discuss Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment]]

----

== Chapter 2 Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation, section 4: Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment ==

=== Introduction ===

: [[Chapter 2]]

=== The Diversity of Strategies in our Current Information Production System ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 1]]

=== The Effects of Exclusive Rights ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 2]]

=== When Information Production Meets the Computer Network ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 3]]

=== Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment ===

We now have the basic elements of a clash between incumbent institutions and emerging social practice. Technologies of information and cultural production initially led to the increasing salience of commercial, industrial-model production in these areas. Over the course of the twentieth century, in some of the most culturally visible industries like movies and music, copyright law coevolved with the industrial model. By the end of the twentieth century, copyright was longer, broader, and vastly more encompassing than it had been at the beginning of that century. Other exclusive rights in information, culture, and the fruits of innovation expanded following a similar logic. Strong, broad, exclusive rights like these have predictable effects. They preferentially improve the returns to business models that rely on exclusive rights, like copyrights and patents, at the expense of information and cultural production outside the market or in market relationships that do not depend on exclusive appropriation. They make it more lucrative to consolidate inventories of existing materials. The businesses that developed around the material capital required for production fed back into the political system, which responded by serially optimizing the institutional ecology to fit the needs of the industrial information economy firms at the expense of other information producers.

The networked information economy has upset the apple cart on the technical, material cost side of information production and exchange. The institutional ecology, the political framework (the lobbyists, the habits of legislatures), and the legal culture (the beliefs of judges, the practices of lawyers) have not changed. They are as they developed over the course of the twentieth century - centered on optimizing the conditions of those commercial firms that thrive in the presence of strong exclusive rights in information and culture. The outcome of the conflict between the industrial information economy and its emerging networked alternative will determine whether we evolve into a permission culture, as Lessig warns and projects, or into a society marked by social practice of nonmarket production and cooperative sharing of information, knowledge, and culture of the type I describe throughout this book, and which I argue will improve freedom and justice in liberal societies. Chapter 11 chronicles many of the arenas in which this basic conflict is played out. However, for the remainder of this part and part II, the basic economic understanding I offer here is all that is necessary.

There are diverse motivations and strategies for organizing information production. Their relative attractiveness is to some extent dependent on technology, to some extent on institutional arrangements. The rise that we see today in the efficacy and scope of nonmarket production, and of the peer production that I describe and analyze in the following two chapters, are well within the predictable, given our understanding of the economics of information production. The social practices of information production that form the basis of much of the normative analysis I offer in part II are internally sustainable given the material conditions of information production and exchange in the digitally networked environment. These patterns are unfamiliar to us. They grate on our intuitions about how production happens. They grate on the institutional arrangements we developed over the course of the twentieth century to regulate information and cultural production. But that is because they arise from a quite basically different set of material conditions. We must understand these new modes of production. We must learn to evaluate them and compare their advantages and disadvantages to those of the industrial information producers. And then we must adjust our institutional environment to make way for the new social practices made possible by the networked environment.

----

[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation|Chapter 2: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 2, section 4|Discuss Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment]]
</td>
</tr>

Domain toolkit

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= Domain toolkit =

:

== Web site ==

=== Domain registration ===

=== Web hosting ===

=== Email addresses ===

=== Modular structure ===

=== Database engine ===

=== Web services ===

=== Blogs ===

=== Wiki spaces ===

==== Public ====

==== Member only ====

=== Knowledge base ===

== Forms ==

Web forms offer the simplest way to gather information contributed to a web site

=== Member registration ===

==== Affiliation ====

==== Contact information ====

==== Profile ====

==== Interests ====

==== Skills ====

==== Resources ====

==== Needs ====

=== E-list subscription ===

== More to come ... ==

2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation

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↑ [[Table of Contents]] 
← [[Part One|Part One: Overview]] | [[3. Peer Production and Sharing|Chapter 3]] →

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_2.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 2|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]
* [[Summary Chapter 2|Summary (wiki)]]

== Summary ==

Information is nonrivalrous (we can both use it at the same time). It is also circular in that it is both input and output to its own production -- building a table requires wood, writing a paper requires other papers. Copyright laws are justified as making information rivalrous and thus creating a market for it but are constrained so that later the result can be used in the circular production process. But how is producing information actually motivated?

Strategies of producers fall along two axes: benefit maximization (using exclusive rights to make money, using nonexclusive rights to make money, using nonexclusive rights to get non-monetary benefits) and cost minimization (using public domain information, using purchased/owned information, and using privately shared information). This results in nine production strategies. Each strategy receives different inefficiencies from copyright law, so a law's effects depend on which strategies are used. But which strategies get used depends on the law.

Which strategies are used also depends on the technology. New technology has made nonmarket strategies more practical, but incumbent firms want to protect their own models by strengthening copyright laws.

==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
===Other relevant readings===

==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===
""As it turns out, repeated survey studies since 1981 have shown that in all
industrial sectors except for very few—most notably pharmaceuticals—firm
managers do not see patents as the most important way they capture the
benefits of their research and developments. They rank the advantages that
strong research and development gives them in lowering the cost or improving
the quality of manufacture, being the '''first in the market''', or developing
'''strong marketing relationships''' as more important than patents."
from page 40-41

(emphasis on their strong relevance to Open Source bazaars - [[User:Red1|Red1]])

In the case of Open Source the author gave the example of how IBM spends millions on it to gain other benefits of savings here, but the criteria above of branding and strong market gains are ever more relevant. So much so, erroneusly learning from Linux, many copycat projects are exploitatively trying to ride on ''planting the flag on the mountain'', and what they put out even though open, are more of 'market positioning' ploys. A September 2006 case is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiere Compiere ]been a premier OS player in the Small Medium Business sector, but adopts a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar ''Cathedral''] approach instead. They soon lost the branding advantage to [http://www.adempiere.com/wiki/index.php/Media_Coverage ADempiere] been obediently true ''peer-based community'' Compiere fork which proves the author's basis in this chapter. The ''wealth of networking'' by the community members quickly obliterate whatever [https://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=176962&ugn=adempiere advantage] Compiere had prior to it going after some funding - the matador's cloth of many OSS ploys. As another more recent case of [http://opensourceculture.blogspot.com/2006/11/yes-i-know.html Redhat vs Oracle] shows, such ''ploys'' are beginning to show its slip.
By such account, other pro-monetary projects such as MySpace, Google, YouTube may suffer the same threats as Netscape, Yahoo! and Hotmail has. [http://www.adempiere.org ADempiere] and another similar [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mambo_(CMS) OSS] fork, [http://www.joomla.org/ Joomla!] are living proofs that OSS can stay rich for all its members without funding, and in perpetual mode.

===Counter-examples===

==Key Concepts==

'''Non-rival''' (36)

'''Standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants Effect''' (37)

'''Input/Output Circularity (see Standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants Effect)
'''

Summary Chapter 2

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==Summary of the chapter==

===Overview===

Information and culture are fundamentally different from standard "economic goods" such as steel and cars in two ways. First, standard goods are rival or exclusive while information is nonrival. Consider an apple: If I eat it, you cannot also eat it. If you want to eat an apple too, more resources (trees, irrigation, fertilizer, labor, etc.) will have to be expended to procure you that apple. This is not the case with information. You and I can both read this book at the same time. My consumption of the information contained in the book in no way diminishes that information or prevents others from consuming it as well. The second way in which information differs from other goods is that it is both an input and an output of its own production process. Consider a wood table: the inputs of the production process are wood, fastening devices (nails, glue), and labor. A carpenter uses these things to make the output: a table. Now consider an academic paper: The inputs are ideas and labor and these ideas are often grounded in previous academic papers. Academic papers are thus "used" in producing new academic papers.

It is these two properties of information, nonrivalry and input/output circularity, that
explain why the law gives people some property-like rights over information but limits those rights in comparison to those given over other types of goods. The standard rationale for giving people property-like rights over information is that people will fail to produce information if they have no incentives to do so. Copyright, which grants the right holder a monopoly over her creation, allows her to turn information into a rival good, creating scarcity and, thus, a market for her work. That is, while the actual cost of producing a second copy of a book is marginal (it is merely the cost of photocopying the pages), copyright prevents people (through threat of sanction) from doing this without the author's permission, and thus allowing the author to control the distribution of her work.

The standard rationale for limiting the monopoly rights created by copyright and patents is that because information is both an input and an output of information, we should not allow the "building blocks" to be captured indefinitely or entirely. Thus we have time limitations on copyright, thus returning old information to its nonrival state, and "fair use" provisions, allow new producers to use otherwise protected information in certain ways and contexts (e.g., criticism, parody, news reporting).

Many economists describe the system of intellectual property as a balance of static and dynamic efficiencies: Intellectual property creates static inefficiency by artificially raising the price of information goods, but this inefficiency is balanced out, however, by gains in dynamic efficiency in form of creating an incentive for new information production.

This chapter explores whether the realities of information production fit well with standard economic theory. It argues that the efficiency of regulation information, knowledge, and cultural production through strong copyright patent is not only theoretically ambiguous but also empirically inaccurate. This chapter posits that innovation and information production is driven mostly by a mixture of (a) nonmarket sources (both public and private) and (b) market actors whose business models do not depend on the protections of intellectual property.

The chapter concludes that while granting exclusive rights-based over information provides some incentives for the future production of information, a comprehensive intellectual property regime that mimics property too closely (such as the system in both the United States and the European Union) cannot work perfectly even under ideal conditions. The upshot is that noncommercial production can often be more efficient and more important commercial production and that noncommercial production is thus moving to a more central role in our information production system.

===The Diversity of Strategies in Our Current Information Production System===

This section maps the variety of strategies used by information producers. The types of strategies can be divided along two axes. The first is the benefit maximization axis. At one end of this axis are information producers that rely on exclusive rights (such as patents and copyrights) to make money; at the other end, are information producers that give their information away for free in order to gain non-monetary benefits; an in the middle are information producers that aim to make money but not by relying on exclusive rights.

The second axis along which information production strategies are divided is the cost minimization axis. This axis describes the various ways in which information producers minimize the cost of the information inputs they rely on. At one end of this axis are producers who rely on public domain (i.e., free for fall) information; at the other end are information producers who barter with other producers for access to protected information (for example, small companies that form patent pools); in the middle are information producers that a) rely on information they already control, and b) purchase without reciprocity control of new information from other producers.

These two axes of three points each create nine different strategies for the production of information, which Benkler describes as follows:

'''The Romantic Maximizer:''' Relies on the public domain to minimize cost and right-based exclusion to maximize benefit. The classic example of the author writing her novel and selling it to a publisher or inventor creating a machine, patenting it, and marketing the invention.

'''Mickey:''' Relies on intrafirm strategies to minimize cost and rights-based exclusion to maximize benefit. A salient example is Walt Disney, which owns a vast number of copyrights over cartoon characters such a Mickey Mouse. Disney reuses these characters to produce derivative works or it hires animators to create new characters with the proviso that Disney will hold the copyright over these characters as well.

'''RCA:''' Relies on bartering/sharing exclusive rights to minimize cost and rights-based exclusion to maximize benefit. In the 1920s four different companies--RCA, GE, AT&T, and Westinghouse each controlled patents that prevent each other from manufacturing the best radios technologically possible. To solve this problem, these four companies agreed to share their patents with one another but not any outside party. Though no single company had a monopoly, together these four companies could effectively exclude every other competitor from the radio manufacturing market.

'''Scholarly Lawyers:''' Relies on the public domain to minimize cost and gives their information products away for free in order to derive income from other sources. For example, legal scholars are not paid when they publish an article in a law journal. But it is not just their devotion to scholarship that drives them to give their information products away for free. They are also trying to acquire status and good reputation in order to get a job or make tenure. Another example is bands that give music away for free in order to attract audiences to their profit-making performances.

'''Know-How:''' Relies on intrafirm information production to minimize cost, but does not sell that information to acquire profits. Law firms that have libraries of boilerplate forms minimize their cost because they do not have to "re-invent the wheel" every time a client wants to form a contract or draft a license. However, the law firm is not making its money from selling these forms. It's making it money by serving a larger number clients more efficiently.

'''Learning Networks:''' Relies on bartering or sharing information to minimize cost, but does not rely on copyright or patents to maximize benefits. Newspapers that join together to create a wire service share reporting information, but it is not the copyright that makes them money. Rather they wider range of stories they offer (because of the sharing) allows each regional newspaper to attract a greater number of customers.

'''Joe Einstein:''' Relies on the public domain to minimize cost and seeks to maximize non-monetary benefits. Joe Einsteins are moved by a wide range of goals. Status in their relevant communities, personal satisfaction from the act of giving, personal satisfaction from the act of creating. Examples of Joe Einsteins include academics who write articles for fame, carolers who sing for free, users who contribute to mailing lists, or programmers who write free software.

'''Los Alamos:''' Relies on intra-firm information sharing to minimize cost and produces public goods. Often these public goods are used to secure additional funding (government grants) or increase the status of the agency.

'''Limited sharing networks:''' Relies on bartering/sharing protected information to minimize cost and produces public knowledge in order to gain nonmonetary benefits. For example, Academics often join working paper groups where they read each others drafts and provide comments on them so that each member can improve her own work before publication. "Copyleft" conditions on derivative works also fall under this category.

===The Effects of Exclusive Rights===
It is only after we examine the diversity of information appropriation strategies that we can truly understand the effects of strong exclusive intellectual property-type rights. The standard economic justification for copyright is that it sacrifices static efficiency in order to achieved dynamic efficiency. But the effect of static inefficiency is different for each type of appropriation strategy, making the argued for trade off much more complex and ambiguous than the standard justification, in its simple form, allows.

Consider the following hypothetical: There are ten firms in the "infowidget" business. Two these rely on the Romantic Maximizer model--they produce the goods and sell them based on their patent rights. Six of these firms produce infowidgets on supply-side (Know-How) or demand-side (Scholarly Lawyer) models--they make their Realwidgets or Servicewidgets more efficient or desirable to customers. Finally, the last two firms are non-profits that exited on a fixed, endowed income. Each firm produces five infowidgets, for a total market supply of fifty. Now let's imagine a change in law that increases exclusivity and is efficient under the simple justification of IP rights. We'll say it increases input costs by 10 percent, but increases appropriability by 20 percent (giving an expected gain of 10 percent). The Romantic Maximizers will thus see an increase in production from 10 infowidgets to 11--making the policy change seem like a good thing. Looking at the market as a whole, however, we see that eight firms see an increase of 10 percent in costs and zero gain in appropriability (because the other eight firms do not rely on exclusive rights to sell their products). Thus the productivity of these eight firms declines from 40 infowidgets to 36, meaning that market as a whole declines in production from 50 to 37. When the scope of our inquiry is widened we see that the policy change made the market less efficient.

What is important to note is that the strength of exclusivity will shape the population of business strategies. Changing the level of exclusivity makes some models more desirable than others. This change can also affect the value and attraction of consolidating information production.

===When Information Production Meets the Computer Network===

Prior to the industrial information age, music was a largely a relational good. It was something people did in the physical presence of each other. Music was produced in the folk way through hearing, repeating, improvising; in the middle-class way through buying sheet music and playing for others or attending public performances; and in the upper class way though hiring musicians. Capital took the form of instruments and performance space and was widely distributed amongst musicians and performance hall (and drawing room) owners. Music, as a market good, depended on the physical proximity of producer and consumer.

The introduction of the phonograph changed all this by transforming music into a product that could be sold in the industrial information economy. Capital became concentrated in the form of studio owners and recorder producers. And with the broadcast of music over the radio, a smaller number of musicians reached a much greater audience. Placing this in the context of the strategies above, we might say that the music industry shifted from a reliance on Scholarly Lawyer and Joe Einstein models to reliance on Romantic Maximizer and Mickey models.

This stylized story of the music industry typifies the mass media more generally. The mechanical press, the telegraph, the phonograph, film, high-powered radio transmitters--all of these evolutions in technology affected the market for information goods. As the industrial information age progressed ownership of newspapers became increasingly concentrated, as was the case with radio stations, cable networks, and film studios. The lesson here is that the technology of information production also affects the kind of business models that are desirable.

Information and cultural production that three primary types of inputs: 1) existing information; 2) mechanical means of producing and sensing information (printing presses and radio transmitters); and 3) human capacity for creativity. In the industrial information the costs of the second type of input was quite high, making it efficient to have a few producers of information that could reach a wide audience. The costs of the second kind of input, though, are drastically declining in the networked information economy. Thus, when information is priced at its marginal cost (zero), human capacity becomes the only truly scare resource in information production. Human communicative capacity, however, is radically different from printing presses and satellites. It's not the kind of capital good that can be transferred or aggregated; rather the capacity of each individual is as unique as the individual herself. The promise of the networked information age is to bring the rich diversity of our individual experiences smack into the middle of our economy and productive lives.

Nonmarket production has always played a greater role in the production of information goods as it has in standard economic goods. Street performances, story telling by the campfire, religious texts that are given away, not sold, folk songs, free galleries, the list goes on and on. What is changing in the networked information age is that means of producing and exchanging information, knowledge, and culture have not only been drastically reduced in price, but also have been widely dispersed throughout the population. Home computers, personal printers, cheap electronic storage, fast transmission capacity over the internet, etc. Nonmarket behavior is thus becoming central to producing our information and cultural environment

===Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment===

We now have the basic elements for a clash between incumbent institutions and emerging social practices. The incumbent institutions, acting in accordance with rational self-interest, seek to policies that improve the returns on their current business models, which strong, broad, exclusive rights like copyrights and patents. As we have seen, however, technology has evolved so that strong exclusive rights may adversely affect other actors (both market and nonmarket). Thus, we are at a critical juncture for policy development. We must learn to evaluate the effects of exclusive rights on all the modes of information production. And we must be willing to adjust our institutional environment to make way for the new social practices made possible by the changing information economy.

Talk:Library of Congress data

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3. Peer Production and Sharing

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↑ [[Table of Contents]] 
← [[2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation|Chapter 2]] | [[4. The Economics of Social Production|Chapter 4]] →

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_3.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 3|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]
* [[Summary Chapter 3|Summary (wiki)]]
* [[Commentary Chapter 3|Commentary (wiki)]]

==Summary==
It is not intuitive that thousands of volunteers could beat big companies. Yet they do.

Coase argues that corporations exist because the transaction costs of using the market are too high. Yet GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl and others use neither markets nor hierarchies.

I call this commons-based peer production. Commons (as opposed to property) because no one person controls how the resource is used, they are either open to the public or a defined group. Peer production because it is done through self-selected, decentralized individual action.

Examples: Free software, NASA Clickworkers, Wikipedia, Second Life.

Relevance and accredditation technology can ensure the results are good: Open Directory Project, Slashdot (karma).

Distribution tech too: Project Gutenberg.

Sharing tech: SETI@Home, Napster

==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
===Other relevant readings===
==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===
; [http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Amazon Mechanical Turk] : Could be considered micro-outsourcing, allows API access to human effort. ''Also see [http://feeds.feedburner.com/Turkwatch Turkwatch] for an overview of recent MTurk projects''

===Counter-examples===

===Indeterminate Examples (in progress)===
; [http://mycroftnetwork.com Mycroft] : UCB iSchool research project, a generalization of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickworkers ClickWorkers] by utilizing a few seconds of web surfer's abilities to collaboratively solve large problems, without leaving the page. Currently focusing on Wikipedia image tagging and [http://www.gutenberg.org/ Project Gutenberg].

==Key Concepts==

Notes

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===[http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Notes.pdf Download full notes here]===
=Notes=
== Introduction ==
=== Chapter 1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge ===
:
# Barry Wellman et al., “The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism,” ''JCMC'' 8, no. 3 (April 2003).
# Langdon Winner, ed., “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in ''The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–39.
# Harold Innis, ''The Bias of Communication'' (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Innis too is often lumped with McLuhan and Walter Ong as a technological determinist. His work was, however, one of a political economist, and he emphasized the relationship between technology and economic and social organization, much more than the deterministic operation of technology on human cognition and capability.
# Lawrence Lessig, ''Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'' (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
# Manuel Castells, ''The Rise of Networked Society'' (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

== Part One. The Networked Information Economy ==
;PART I. The Networked Information Economy
:I. Elizabeth Eisenstein, ''Printing Press as an Agent of Change'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

=== Chapter 2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production & Innovation ===
:
# The full statement was: “[A]ny information obtained, say a new method of production, should, from the welfare point of view, be available free of charge (apart from the costs of transmitting information). This insures optimal utilization of the information but of course provides no incentive for investment in research. In a free enterprise economy, inventive activity is supported by using the invention to create property rights; precisely to the extent that it is successful, there is an underutilization of information.” Kenneth Arrow, “Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention,” in'' Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors'', ed. Richard R. Nelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 616–617.
# Suzanne Scotchmer, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative Research and the Patent Law,” ''Journal of Economic Perspectives'' 5 (1991): 29–41.
# ''Eldred v. Ashcroft'', 537 U.S. 186 (2003).
# Adam Jaffe, “The U.S. Patent System in Transition: Policy Innovation and the Innovation Process,” ''Research Policy'' 29 (2000): 531.
# Josh Lerner, “Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years” (working paper no. 8977, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2002).
# At most, a “hot news” exception on the model of ''International News Service v. Associated Press'', 248 U.S. 215 (1918), might be required. Even that, however, would only be applicable to online editions that are for pay. In paper, habits of reading, accreditation of the original paper, and first-to-market advantages of even a few hours would be enough. Online, where the first-to-market advantage could shrink to seconds, “hot news” protection may be worthwhile. However, almost all papers are available for free and rely solely on advertising. The benefits of reading a copied version are, at that point, practically insignificant to the reader.
# Wesley Cohen, R. Nelson, and J. Walsh, “Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)” (working paper no. 7552, National Bureau Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2000); Richard Levin et al., “Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development” ''Brookings Papers on Economic Activity'' 3 (1987): 783; Mansfield et al., “Imitation Costs and Patents: An Empirical Study,” ''The Economic Journal'' 91 (1981): 907.
# In the 2002 Economic Census, compare NAICS categories 5415 (computer systems and related services) to NAICS 5112 (software publishing). Between the 1997 Economic Census and the 2002 census, this ratio remained stable, at about 36 percent in 1997 and 37 percent in 2002. See 2002 Economic Census, “Industry Series, Information, Software Publishers, and Computer Systems, Design and Related Services” (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2004).
# Levin et al., “Appropriating the Returns,” 794–796 (secrecy, lead time, and learningcurve advantages regarded as more effective than patents by most firms). See also F. M. Scherer, “Learning by Doing and International Trade in Semiconductors” (faculty research working paper series R94-13, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1994), an empirical study of semiconductor industry suggesting that for industries with steep learning curves, investment in information production is driven by advantages of being first down the learning curve rather than the expectation of legal rights of exclusion. The absorption effect is described in Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Leventhal, “Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R&D,” ''The Economic Journal'' 99 (1989): 569–596. The collaboration effect was initially described in Richard R. Nelson, “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research,” ''Journal of Political Economy'' 67 (June 1959): 297–306. The most extensive work over the past fifteen years, and the source of the term of learning networks, has been from Woody Powell on knowledge and learning networks. Identifying the role of markets made concentrated by the limited ability to use information, rather than through exclusive rights, was made in F. M. Scherer, “Nordhaus’s Theory of Optimal Patent Life: A Geometric Reinterpretation,” ''American Economic Review'' 62 (1972): 422–427.
# Eric von Hippel, ''Democratizing Innovation'' (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
# Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” ''First Monday'' (1999), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/.

=== Chapter 3. Peer Production and Sharing ===
:
# For an excellent history of the free software movement and of open-source development, see Glyn Moody, ''Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution'' (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2001).
# Elinor Ostrom, ''Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
# Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, “The Scope of Open Source Licensing” (Harvard NOM working paper no. 02–42, table 1, Cambridge, MA, 2002). The figure is computed out of the data reported in this paper for the number of free software development projects that Lerner and Tirole identify as having “restrictive” or “very restrictive” licenses.
# Netcraft, April 2004 Web Server Survey, http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_ server_survey.html.
# Clickworkers Results: Crater Marking Activity, July 3, 2001, http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf.
# B. Kanefsky, N. G. Barlow, and V. C. Gulick, ''Can Distributed Volunteers Accomplish Massive Data Analysis Tasks?'' http://www.clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/abstract.pdf.
# J. Giles, “Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head,” Nature, December 14, 2005, available at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html .
# http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html.
# Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” ''Yale Law Journal'' 112 (2001): 369.
# IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm.
# For the full argument, see Yochai Benkler, “Some Economics of Wireless Communications,” ''Harvard Journal of Law and Technology'' 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, “Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment,” ''Harvard Journal of Law and Technology'' 11 (1998): 287. For an excellent overview of the intellectual history of this debate and a contribution to the institutional design necessary to make space for this change, see Kevin Werbach, “Supercommons: Towards a Unified Theory of Wireless Communication,” ''Texas Law Review'' 82 (2004): 863. The policy implications of computationally intensive radios using wide bands were first raised by George Gilder in “The New Rule of the Wireless,” ''Forbes ASAP'', March 29, 1993, and Paul Baran, “Visions of the 21st Century Communications: Is the Shortage of Radio Spectrum for Broadband Networks of the Future a Self Made Problem?” (keynote talk transcript, 8th Annual Conference on Next Generation Networks, Washington, DC, November 9, 1994). Both statements focused on the potential abundance of spectrum, and how it renders “spectrum management” obsolete. Eli Noam was the first to point out that, even if one did not buy the idea that computationally intensive radios eliminated scarcity, they still rendered spectrum property rights obsolete, and enabled instead a fluid, dynamic, real-time market in spectrum clearance rights. See Eli Noam, “Taking the Next Step Beyond Spectrum Auctions: Open Spectrum Access,” ''Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Magazine'' 33, no. 12 (1995): 66–73; later elaborated in Eli Noam, “Spectrum Auction: Yesterday’s Heresy, Today’s Orthodoxy, Tomorrow’s Anachronism. Taking the Next Step to Open Spectrum Access,” ''Journal of Law and Economics'' 41 (1998): 765, 778–780. The argument that equipment markets based on a spectrum commons, or free access to frequencies, could replace the role planned for markets in spectrum property rights with computationally intensive equipment and sophisticated network sharing protocols, and would likely be more efficient even assuming that scarcity persists, was made in Benkler, “Overcoming Agoraphobia.” Lawrence Lessig, ''Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'' (New York: Basic Books, 1999) and Lawrence Lessig, ''The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World'' (New York: Random House, 2001) developed a rationale based on the innovation dynamic in support of the economic value of open wireless networks. David Reed, “Comments for FCC Spectrum Task Force on Spectrum Policy,” filed with the Federal Communications Commission July 10, 2002, crystallized the technical underpinnings and limitations of the idea that spectrum can be regarded as property.
# See Benkler, “Some Economics,” 44–47. The term “cooperation gain” was developed by Reed to describe a somewhat broader concept than “diversity gain” is in multiuser information theory.
# ''Spectrum Policy Task Force Report to the Commission'' (Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, 2002); Michael K. Powell, “Broadband Migration III: New Directions in Wireless Policy” (Remarks at the Silicon Flatiron Telecommunications Program, University of Colorado at Boulder, October 30, 2002).

=== Chapter 4. The Economics of Social Production ===
# Richard M. Titmuss, ''The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy'' (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 94.
# Kenneth J. Arrow, “Gifts and Exchanges,” ''Philosophy & Public Affairs'' 1 (1972): 343.
# Bruno S. Frey, ''Not Just for Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation'' (Brook- field, VT: Edward Elgar, 1997); Bruno S. Frey, ''Inspiring Economics: Human Motivation in Political Economy'' (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2001), 52–72. An excellent survey of this literature is Bruno S. Frey and Reto Jegen, “Motivation Crowding Theory,” ''Journal of Economic Surveys'' 15, no. 5 (2001): 589. For a crystallization of the underlying psychological theory, see Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, ''Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior'' (New York: Plenum, 1985).
# Roland Be´nabou and Jean Tirole, “Self-Confidence and Social Interactions” (working paper no. 7585, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, March 2000).
# Truman F. Bewley, “A Depressed Labor Market as Explained by Participants,” ''American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings)'' 85 (1995): 250, provides survey data about managers’ beliefs about the effects of incentive contracts; Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey, “Motivation, Knowledge Transfer, and Organizational Form,” ''Organization Science'' 11 (2000): 538, provides evidence that employees with tacit knowledge communicate it to coworkers more efficiently without extrinsic motivations, with the appropriate social motivations, than when money is offered for “teaching” their knowledge; Bruno S. Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out,” ''American Economic Review'' 87 (1997): 746; and Howard Kunreuther and Douslar Easterling, “Are Risk-Benefit Tradeoffs Possible in Siting Hazardous Facilities?” ''American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings)'' 80 (1990): 252–286, describe empirical studies where communities became less willing to accept undesirable public facilities (Not in My Back Yard or NIMBY) when offered compensation, relative to when the arguments made were policy based on the common weal; Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” ''Journal of Legal Studies'' 29 (2000): 1, found that introducing a fine for tardy pickup of kindergarten kids increased, rather than decreased, the tardiness of parents, and once the sense of social obligation was lost to the sense that it was “merely” a transaction, the parents continued to be late at pickup, even after the fine was removed.
# James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” ''American Journal of Sociology'' 94, supplement (1988): S95, S108. For important early contributions to this literature, see Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” ''American Journal of Sociology'' 78 (1973): 1360; Mark Granovetter, ''Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Yoram Ben- Porath, “The F-Connection: Families, Friends and Firms and the Organization of Exchange,” Population and Development Review 6 (1980): 1.
# Nan Lin, ''Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 150–151.
# Steve Weber, ''The Success of Open Source'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
# Maurice Godelier, ''The Enigma of the Gift'', trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5.
# Godelier, ''The Enigma'', 106.
# In the legal literature, Robert Ellickson, ''Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), is the locus classicus for showing how social norms can substitute for law. For a bibliography of the social norms literature outside of law, see Richard H. McAdams, “The Origin, Development, and Regulation of Norms,” ''Michigan Law Review'' 96 (1997): 338n1, 339n2. Early contributions were: Edna Ullman-Margalit, ''The Emergence of Norms'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); James Coleman, “Norms as Social Capital,” in ''Economic Imperialism: The Economic Approach Applied Outside the Field of Economics'', ed. Peter Bernholz and Gerard Radnitsky (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987), 133–155; Sally E. Merry, “Rethinking Gossip and Scandal,” in T''oward a Theory of Social Control, Fundamentals'', ed. Donald Black (New York: Academic Press, 1984).
# On policing, see Robert C. Ellickson, “Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning,” ''Yale Law Journal'' 105 (1996): 1165, 1194–1202; and Dan M. Kahan, “Between Economics and Sociology: The New Path of Deterrence,” ''Michigan Law Review'' 95 (1997): 2477.
# An early and broad claim in the name of commons in resources for communication and transportation, as well as human community building—like roads, canals, or social-gathering places—is Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” ''University Chicago Law Review'' 53 (1986): 711. Condensing around the work of Elinor Ostrom, a more narrowly defined literature developed over the course of the 1990s: Elinor Ostrom, ''Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Another seminal study was James M. Acheson, ''The Lobster Gangs of Maine'' (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1988). A brief intellectual history of the study of common resource pools and common property regimes can be found in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, “Ideas, Artifacts, Facilities, and Content: Information as a Common-Pool Resource,” ''Law & Contemporary Problems'' (2003): 111.

=== Chapter 5. Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law ===
:
# Robert Post, "Meiklejohn's Mistake: Individual Autonomy and the Reform of Public Discourse," University of Colorado Law Review 64 (1993): 1109, 1130-1132.
# This conception of property was first introduced and developed systematically by Robert Lee Hale in the 1920s and 1930s, and was more recently integrated with contemporary postmodern critiques of power by Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing Etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
# White Paper, "Controlling Your Network, A Must for Cable Operators" (1999), http://www.cptech.org/ecom/openaccess/cisco1.html.
# Data are all based on FCC Report on High Speed Services, Appendix to Fourth 706 Report NOI (Washington, DC: Federal Communications Commission, December 2003).

=== Chapter 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media ===
:
# Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
# Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jeremey Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac's Gazzette de Leyde (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
# Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 33-46.
# Starr, Creation of the Media, 48-62, 86-87.
# Starr, Creation of the Media, 131-133.
# Starr, Creation of the Media, 135.
# The following discussion of the birth of radio is adapted from Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (Winter 1997-1998): 287. That article provides the detailed support for the description. The major secondary works relied on are Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966-1970); Gleason Archer, History of Radio to 1926 (New York: Arno Press, 1971); and Philip T. Rosen, Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1920-1934 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
# Robert Waterman McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
# "Names of U.S. Dead Read on Nightline," Associated Press Report, May 1, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864247/.
# The numbers given here are taken from The Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/, and are based on information released by the Federal Elections Commission.
# A careful catalog of these makes up the first part of C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
# Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 5th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 118.
# Peter O. Steiner, "Program Patterns and Preferences, and the Workability of Competition in Radio Broadcasting," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 66 (1952): 194. The major other contribution in this literature is Jack H. Beebe, "Institutional Structure and Program Choices in Television Markets," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 91 (1977): 15. A parallel line of analysis of the relationship between programming and the market structure of broadcasting began with Michael Spence and Bruce Owen, "Television Programming, Monopolistic Competition, and Welfare," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 91 (1977): 103. For an excellent review of this literature, see Matthew L. Spitzer, "Justifying Minority Preferences in Broadcasting," South California Law Review 64 (1991): 293, 304-319.

=== Chapter 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere ===
:
# Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 852-853, and 896-897 (1997).
# Elizabeth Jensen, "Sinclair Fires Journalist After Critical Comments," Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2004.
# Jensen, "Sinclair Fires Journalist"; Sheridan Lyons, "Fired Reporter Tells Why He Spoke Out," Baltimore Sun, October 29, 2004.
# The various posts are archived and can be read, chronologically, at http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_10.php.
# Duane D. Stanford, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 31, 2002, 1A.
# Katherine Q. Seelye, "The 2002 Campaign: The States; Georgia About to Plunge into Touch-Screen Voting," New York Times, October 30, 2002, A22.
# Edward Walsh, "Election Day to Be Test of Voting Process," Washington Post, November 4, 2002, A1.
# Washington Post, December 12, 2002.
# Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Inc., 337 F. Supp. 2d 1195 (2004).
# California Secretary of State Voting Systems Panel, Meeting Minutes, November 3, 2003, http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/vsp_min_110303.pdf.
# Eli Noam, "Will the Internet Be Bad for Democracy?" (November 2001), http://www.citi.columbia.edu/elinoam/articles/int_bad_dem.htm.
# Eli Noam, "The Internet Still Wide, Open, and Competitive?" Paper presented at The Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2003, http://www.tprc.org/papers/2003/200/noam_TPRC2003.pdf.
# Federal Communications Commission, Report on High Speed Services, December 2003.
# See Eszter Hargittai, "The Changing Online Landscape: From Free-For-All to Commercial Gatekeeping," http://www.eszter.com/research/pubs/hargittai-onlinelandscape.pdf.
# Derek de Solla Price, "Networks of Scientific Papers," Science 149 (1965): 510; Herbert Simon, "On a Class of Skew Distribution Function," Biometrica 42 (1955): 425-440, reprinted in Herbert Simon, Models of Man Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting (New York: Garland, 1957).
# Albert-Lászio Barabási and Reka Albert, "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks," Science 286 (1999): 509.
# Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic, "Growth Dynamics of the World Wide Web," Nature 401 (1999): 131.
# Albert-Lászio Barabási, Linked, How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Penguin, 2003), 56-57. One unpublished quantitative study showed specifically that the skewness holds for political Web sites related to various hot-button political issues in the United States-like abortion, gun control, or the death penalty. A small fraction of the Web sites discussing these issues account for the large majority of links into them. Matthew Hindman, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, and Judy Johnson, " 'Googlearchy': How a Few Heavily Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web," July 28, 2003, http://www.princeton.edu/~mhindman/googlearchy--hindman.pdf.
# Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, "Power Law Distribution of the World Wide Web," Science 287 (2000): 2115.
# Ravi Kumar et al., "Trawling the Web for Emerging Cyber-Communities," WWW8/Computer Networks 31, nos. 11-16 (1999): 1481-1493.
# Gary W. Flake et al., "Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities," IEEE Computer 35, no. 3 (2002): 66-71. Another paper that showed significant internal citations within topics was Soumen Chakrabati et al., "The Structure of Broad Topics on the Web," WWW2002, Honolulu, HI, May 7-11, 2002.
# Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election: Divided They Blog," March 1, 2005, http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf.
# M.E.J. Newman, "The Structure and Function of Complex Networks," Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review 45, section 4.2.2 (2003): 167-256; S. N. Dorogovstev and J.F.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
# This structure was first described by Andrei Broder et al., "Graph Structure of the Web," paper presented at www9 conference (1999), http://www.almaden.ibm.com/webfountain/resources/GraphStructureintheWeb.pdf. It has since been further studied, refined, and substantiated in various studies.
# Dill et al., "Self-Similarity in the Web" (San Jose, CA: IBM Almaden Research Center, 2001); S. N. Dorogovstev and J.F.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks.
# Soumen Chakrabarti et al., "The Structure of Broad Topics on the Web," WWW2002, Honolulu, HI, May 7-11, 2002.
# Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, "The Power and Politics of Blogs" (July 2004), http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/blogpaperfinal.pdf.
# D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small World' Networks," Nature 393 (1998): 440-442; D. J. Watts, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
# Clay Shirky, "Power Law, Weblogs, and Inequality" (February 8, 2003), http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.htm; Jason Kottke, "Weblogs and Power Laws" (February 9, 2003), http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws.
# Ravi Kumar et al., "On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace," Proceedings of WWW2003, May 20-24, 2003, http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p477/p477-kumar/p477-kumar.htm.
# Both of these findings are consistent with even more recent work by Hargittai, E., J. Gallo and S. Zehnder, "Mapping the Political Blogosphere: An Analysis of Large-Scale Online Political Discussions," 2005. Poster presented at the International Communication Association meetings, New York.
# Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Case Program: " 'Big Media' Meets 'Bloggers': Coverage of Trent Lott's Remarks at Strom Thurmond's Birthday Party," http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Case_Studies/1731_0.pdf.
# Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002).
# Data taken from CIA World Fact Book (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2004).
# Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" (working paper no. 55, University of San Diego School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory, June 2003).
# Amnesty International, People's Republic of China, State Control of the Internet in China (2002).
# A synthesis of news-based accounts is Babak Rahimi, "Cyberdissent: The Internet in Revolutionary Iran," Middle East Review of International Affairs 7, no. 3 (2003).

=== Chapter 8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical ===
:
# Karl Marx, "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Deutsch-Französicher Jahrbucher (1844).
# Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 333-335, 141-146.
# Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 29.
# Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 76, 83.
# Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 22-23.
# Encyclopedia.com is a part of Highbeam Research, Inc., which combines free and pay research services. Bartleby provides searching and access to many reference and high-culture works at no charge, combining it with advertising, a book store, and many links to Amazon.com or to the publishers for purchasing the printed versions of the materials.
# Jack Balkin, "Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society," New York University Law Review 79 (2004): 1.

=== Chapter 9. Justice and Development ===
:
# Anne Alstott and Bruce Ackerman, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
# Numbers are all taken from the 2004 Human Development Report (New York: UN Development Programme, 2004).
# Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 46-47.
# Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000), 273.
# Harold Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1999).
# C. K. Prahald, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School of Publishing, 2005), 319-357, Section 4, "The ITC e-Choupal Story."
# For the sources of numbers for the software industry, see chapter 2 in this volume. IBM numbers, in particular, are identified in figure 2.1.
# These arguments were set out most clearly and early in a public exchange of letters between Representative Villanueva Nunez in Peru and Microsoft's representatives in that country. The exchange can be found on the Web site of the Open Source Initiative, http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php.
# A good regional study of the extent and details of educational deprivation is Mahbub ul Haq and Khadija ul Haq, Human Development in South Asia 1998: The Education Challenge (Islamabad, Pakistan: Human Development Center).
# Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, eds., Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity: The Impact of International Agricultural Research (New York: CABI Pub., 2002); results summarized in Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, "Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960-2000," Science 300 (May 2003): 758-762.
# Jack R. Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492-2000 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), table 2.2.
# USDA National Agriculture Statistics Survey (2004), http://www.usda.gov/nass/aggraphs/fncht3.htm.
# First Report of the GM Science Review Panel, An Open Review of the Science Relevant to GM Crops and Food Based on the Interests and Concerns of the Public, United Kingdom, July 2003.
# Robert E. Evenson, "GMOs: Prospects for Productivity Increases in Developing Countries," Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization 2 (2004): article 2.
# Elliot Marshall, "A Deal for the Rice Genome," Science 296 (April 2002): 34.
# Jikun Huang et al., "Plant Biotechnology in China," Science 295 (2002): 674.
# Huang et al., "Plant Biotechnology."
# Richard Atkinson et al., "Public Sector Collaboration for Agricultural IP Management," Science 301 (2003): 174.
# This table is a slightly expanded version of one originally published in Yochai Benkler, "Commons Based Strategies and the Problems of Patents," Science 305 (2004): 1110.
# Wim Broothaertz et al., "Gene Transfer to Plants by Diverse Species of Bacteria," Nature 433 (2005): 629.
# These numbers and others in this paragraph are taken from the 2004 WHO World Health Report, Annex Table 2.
# National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resource Statistics, Special Report: National Patterns of Research and Development Resources: 2003 NSF 05-308 (Arlington, VA: NSF, 2005), table 1.
# The detailed analysis can be found in Amy Kapzcynzki et al., "Addressing Global Health Inequities: An Open Licensing Paradigm for Public Sector Inventions," Berkeley Journal of Law and Technology (Spring 2005).
# See Jean Lanjouw, "A New Global Patent Regime for Diseases: U.S. and International Legal Issues," Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 16 (2002).
# S. Maurer, A. Sali, and A. Rai, "Finding Cures for Tropical Disease: Is Open Source the Answer?" Public Library of Science: Medicine 1, no. 3 (December 2004): e56.

=== Chapter 10. Social Ties: Networking Together ===
:
# Sherry Turkle, "Virtuality and Its Discontents, Searching for Community in Cyberspace," The American Prospect 7, no. 24 (1996); Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
# Robert Kraut et al., "Internet Paradox, A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well Being," American Psychologist 53 (1998): 1017-1031.
# A fairly typical statement of this view, quoted in a study commissioned by the Kellogg Foundation, was: "TV or other media, such as computers, are no longer a kind of 'electronic hearth,' where a family will gather around and make decisions or have discussions. My position, based on our most recent studies, is that most media in the home are working against bringing families together." Christopher Lee et al., "Evaluating Information and Communications Technology: Perspective for a Balanced Approach," Report to the Kellogg Foundation (December 17, 2001), http://www.si.umich.edu/pne/kellogg/013.html.
# Norman H. Nie and Lutz Ebring, "Internet and Society, A Preliminary Report," Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, February 17, 2000, 15 (Press Release), http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/bctf/Stanford_Report.pdf.
# Ibid., 42-43, tables CH-WFAM, CH-WFRN.
# See John Markoff and A. Newer, "Lonelier Crowd Emerges in Internet Study," New York Times, February 16, 2000, section A, page 1, column 1.
# Nie and Ebring, "Internet and Society," 19.
# Amitai Etzioni, "Debating the Societal Effects of the Internet: Connecting with the World," Public Perspective 11 (May/June 2000): 42, also available at http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/A273.html.
# Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked Society 2d ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000).
# Barry Wellman et al., "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (April 2003).
# Robert Kraut et al., "Internet Paradox Revisited," Journal of Social Issues 58, no. 1 (2002): 49.
# Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman, "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb," City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 277.
# Gustavo S. Mesch and Yael Levanon, "Community Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in Two Suburban Localities," City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 335.
# Useful surveys include: Paul DiMaggio et al., "Social Implications of the Internet," Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 307-336; Robyn B. Driskell and Larry Lyon, "Are Virtual Communities True Communities? Examining the Environments and Elements of Community," City & Community 1, no. 4 (December 2002): 349; James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice, Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
# Barry Wellman, "Computer Networks as Social Networks," Science 293, issue 5537 (September 2001): 2031.
# Jeffery I. Cole et al., "The UCLA Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Future, Year Three" (UCLA Center for Communication Policy, January 2003), 33, 55, 62, http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-Report-Year-Three.pdf.
# Pew Internet and Daily Life Project (August 11, 2004), report available at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/131/report_display.asp.
# See Barry Wellman, "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (April 2003); Gustavo S. Mesch and Yael Levanon, "Community Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in Two Suburban Localities, City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 335.
# Barry Wellman, "The Social Affordances of the Internet."
# A review of Ito's own work and that of other scholars of Japanese techno-youth culture is Mizuko Ito, "Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Re-Placement of Social Contact," forthcoming in Mobile Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere, ed., Rich Ling and P. Pedersen (New York: Springer, 2005).
# Dana M. Boyd, "Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking," Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004) (Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004).
# James W. Carrey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
# Clay Shirky, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," published first in Networks, Economics and Culture mailing list July 1, 2003.

=== PART III. Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation ===
:
# For a review of the literature and a substantial contribution to it, see James Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter-Spring 2003): 33-74.
# Early versions in the legal literature of the skepticism regarding the growth of exclusive rights were Ralph Brown's work on trademarks, Benjamin Kaplan's caution over the gathering storm that would become the Copyright Act of 1976, and Stephen Breyer's work questioning the economic necessity of copyright in many industries. Until, and including the 1980s, these remained, for the most part, rare voices-joined in the 1980s by David Lange's poetic exhortation for the public domain; Pamela Samuelson's systematic critique of the application of copyright to computer programs, long before anyone was paying attention; Jessica Litman's early work on the political economy of copyright legislation and the systematic refusal to recognize the public domain as such; and William Fisher's theoretical exploration of fair use. The 1990s saw a significant growth of academic questioning of enclosure: Samuelson continued to press the question of copyright in software and digital materials; Litman added a steady stream of prescient observations as to where the digital copyright was going and how it was going wrong; Peter Jaszi attacked the notion of the romantic author; Ray Patterson developed a user-centric view of copyright; Diane Zimmerman revitalized the debate over the conflict between copyright and the first amendment; James Boyle introduced erudite criticism of the theoretical coherence of the relentless drive to propertization; Niva Elkin Koren explored copyright and democracy; Keith Aoki questioned trademark, patents, and global trade systems; Julie Cohen early explored technical protection systems and privacy; and Eben Moglen began mercilessly to apply the insights of free software to hack at the foundations of intellectual property apologia. Rebecca Eisenberg, and more recently, Arti Rai, questioned the wisdom of patents on research tools to biomedical innovation. In this decade, William Fisher, Larry Lessig, Litman, and Siva Vaidhyanathan have each described the various forms that the enclosure movement has taken and exposed its many limitations. Lessig and Vaidhyanathan, in particular, have begun to explore the relations between the institutional battles and the freedom in the networked environment.

=== Chapter 11. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment ===
:
# Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
# Ithiel de Sola-Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), 91-100.
# Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, 2004 U.S. App. LEXIS 26877.
# Other layer-based abstractions have been proposed, most effectively by Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung, The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law, University of San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Their model more closely hews to the OSI layers, and is tailored to being more specifically usable for a particular legal principle-never regulate at a level lower than you need to. I seek a higherlevel abstraction whose role is not to serve as a tool to constrain specific rules, but as a map for understanding the relationships between diverse institutional elements as they relate to the basic problem of how information is produced and exchanged in society.
# The first major treatment of this phenomenon was Michael Froomkin, "The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage" (1996), http://www.law.miami.edu/froomkin/articles/arbitr.htm.
# Jonathan Krim, "AOL Blocks Spammers' Web Sites," Washington Post, March 20, 2004, p. A01; also available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A9449-2004Mar19&notFound=true.
# FCC Report on High Speed Services, December 2003 (Appendix to Fourth 706 Report NOI).
# 216 F.3d 871 (9th Cir. 2000).
# National Cable and Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services (decided June 27, 2005).
# Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622 (1994) and Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC, 520 U.S. 180 (1997).
# Chesapeake & Potomac Tel. Co. v. United States, 42 F.3d 181 (4th Cir. 1994); Comcast Cablevision of Broward County, Inc. v. Broward County, 124 F. Supp. 2d 685, 698 (D. Fla., 2000).
# The locus classicus of the economists' critique was Ronald Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of Law and Economics 2 (1959): 1. The best worked-out version of how these property rights would look remains Arthur S. De Vany et al., "A Property System for Market Allocation of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: A Legal-Economic-Engineering Study," Stanford Law Review 21 (1969): 1499.
# City of Abilene, Texas v. Federal Communications Commission, 164 F3d 49 (1999).
# Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, 541 U.S. 125 (2004).
# Bill Number S. 2048, 107th Congress, 2nd Session.
# Felten v. Recording Indust. Assoc. of America Inc., No. CV- 01-2669 (D.N.J. June 26, 2001).
# Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, Ltd. (decided June 27, 2005).
# See Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales" (working paper), http://www.unc.edu/cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf.
# Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, "Music Downloading, File-Sharing, and Copyright" (Pew, July 2003), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Copyright_Memo.pdf.
# Lee Rainie and Mary Madden, "The State of Music Downloading and File-Sharing Online" (Pew, April 2004), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Filesharing_April_04.pdf.
# See 111 F.Supp.2d at 310, fns. 69-70; PBS Frontline report, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hollywood/business/windows.html.
# A. M. Froomkin, "Semi-Private International Rulemaking: Lessons Learned from the WIPO Domain Name Process," http://www.personal.law.miami.edu/froomkin/articles/TPRC99.pdf.
# Jessica Litman, "The Exclusive Right to Read," Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 13 (1994): 29.
# MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993).
# Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
# Jessica Litman, "Electronic Commerce and Free Speech," Journal of Ethics and Information Technology 1 (1999): 213.
# See Department of Justice Intellectual Property Policy and Programs, http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/ippolicy.htm.
# Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003).
# Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, 383 F.3d 390 (6th Cir.2004).
# 383 F3d 390, 400.
# Mark A. Lemley, "Intellectual Property and Shrinkwrap Licenses," Southern California Law Review 68 (1995): 1239, 1248-1253.
# 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).
# For a more complete technical explanation, see Yochai Benkler, "An Unhurried View of Private Ordering in Information Transactions," Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2063.
# James Boyle, "Cruel, Mean or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property," Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000); Julie E. Cohen, "Copyright and the Jurisprudence of Self-Help," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 13 (1998): 1089; Niva Elkin-Koren, "Copyright Policy and the Limits of Freedom of Contract," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 12 (1997): 93.
# Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 349-350 (1991).
# Directive No. 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, 1996 O.J. (L 77) 20.
# J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, "Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on Science and Technology," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793; Stephen M. Maurer and Suzanne Scotchmer, "Database Protection: Is It Broken and Should We Fix It?" Science 284 (1999): 1129.
# See Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, and Harlan J. Onsrud, "Europe's Database Experiment," Science 294 (2001): 789; Stephen M. Maurer, "Across Two Worlds: Database Protection in the U.S. and Europe," paper prepared for Industry Canada's Conference on Intellectual Property and Innovation in the Knowledge-Based Economy, May 23-24 2001.
# Peter Weiss, "Borders in Cyberspace: Conflicting Public Sector Information Policies and their Economic Impacts" (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, February 2002).
# eBay, Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, Inc., 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13326 (N.D.Cal. 2000).
# The preemption model could be similar to the model followed by the Second Circuit in NBA v. Motorola, 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir. 1997), which restricted state misappropriation claims to narrow bounds delimited by federal policy embedded in the Copyright Act. This might require actual proof that the bots have stopped service, or threaten the service's very existence.
# New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 266 (1964).

UN NGO community

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== UN NGO community ==

: The UN NGO community serves as the basis for an excellent case study of the role of the networked information economy in a rapid phase of growth and development of the community, beginning with the preparations for the 1992 '''Earth Summit''' - ''aka'' '''UNCED''' (UN Conference on Environment and Development) held in Rio de Janeiro. Prior to Rio, NOs in Consultative Status tended to be large international organizations; since that time there has been a rapid growth in accreditation of national and even local NGOs, leading to a much greater represnetation of NGO si developing countries. The Earth Summit broke new ground in encouraging broad participation of nongovernmental organizations - NGOs - in the preparations for the conference, that was reflected in the princple outcome document '''[http://www.un-documents.net/agenda21.htm Agenda 21]'''. in which 10 of the 40 chapters were devoted to "Strengthening the Role of Major Groups". The final chapter of Agend 21 was on "Information for Decision-making" [http://www.un-documents.net/a21-40.htm]

: With strong support from the UNCED Secretariat, a small group of NGOs and the networks of the '''Association for Progressive Communications''' (APC) - including IGC / Econet US)), GreeNnet (UK), Alternex (Brazil), Pegasus (Australia) and the Web (Canada) - a '''Global Electronic Network''' was launched on April 22 1990, Earth Day. The combination of a set of electronic conferences hosted by EcoNet and mirrored on the other APC sites and the use of electronic mail played a vital role in facilitating NGO communication and cooperation that has continued to evolve through the "Rio cluster" of conferences - culminating in the 1996 '''Habitat II''' conference in Istanbul - and beyond.

Here is a preliminary outline of some of the key processes in which the networked information economy played a key role

=== Sustainable Development ===

==== Earth Summit ====

===== Global Elecronic Network =====

===== Agenda 21 =====

===== NGO Alternative Treaties =====

==== Commission on Sustainable Development ====

===== Gopher for CSD documents =====

===== NGO Steering Committee =====

: Electronic mailing lists

==== World Summit on Sustainable Development ====

=== Social Development ===

==== World Summit on Social Development ====

==== NGO Committee on Social Development ====

==== NGO Values Caucus ====

=== Women ===

==== Beijing Women's Conference ====

=== Human Settlements ===

==== Habitat II ====

==== NGO Committee on Human Settlements ====

==== Habitat Partners Network ====

=== Millennium Forum ===

=== NGO Committees ===

: Until the Earth Summit, the substantive committees of '''CONGO''' - Conference Of NonGovernmental Organizations in Consultative relationship with the United Nations [http://www.ngocongo.org] - had played the leadership role in organizing NGO participation in major UN conferences. However, the leadership of CONGO has tended to be relativley elderly, and had developed their information management skills in an industrial information economy and were both generally slow in appreciating the value of ICT and in their willingness to adopt the unfamiliar ways of electronic mail.

: However, by December 1997, it had become clear that information and communication technologies were the way of the future, and a resolutionon Information and Communications [http://www.un-documents.net/docs/ic-congo.htm] was adopted at CONGO's 20th General Assembly.

==== NGO Committee on Education ====

The [[NGO Committee on Education]] has recently embarked on a major initiative with a broad focus on key international decades, and with a commitment to develop a conprehensive interactive web site. The first stage in the web site development has focused on the compilation of an extensive, hyperlinked body of UN documents - General Assembly Resolutions, Global Conference Agreements, Conventions, Declarations, etc - see http://www.un-documents.net

===== UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development =====

===== International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World =====

{{stub}}

{{Footer}}

8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical

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[[Table Of Contents]]

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_8.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 8|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]

==Summary of the chapter==

===Overview===
===Cultural Freedom in Liberal Political Theory===
===The Transparency of Internet Culture===
===The Plasticity of Internet Cutulre: The Future of High-Production-Value Folk Culture===
===A Participatory Culture: Toward Policy===

==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
===Other relevant readings===
==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===
===Counter-examples===
==Key Concepts==

A Perspective on Limiting Device Functionality

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In Chapter 11, Benkler premises his “Device” section on the idea that “[u]biquitous access to such basic machines…is a precondition to the improvements in freedom and justice that we can see emerging in the digital environment” and “[i]t is [that access] to basic, general-purpose computers, as opposed to glorified televisions or telephone handsets, that lies at the very heart of the networked information economy.”

Benkler emphasizes the value of “general purpose” devices with “open architectures” because those devices best enable users to continuously explore, experiment, and access things outside the limited sphere of a specialized machine and allow customization without permission or restrictions from the manufacturer.

Benkler appears to get it right with regard to restrictive physical device regulations like the Fritz chip because those regulations remove computing flexibility from a device that already has it and much value is lost without that flexibility. It seems, however, that a line needs to drawn between that kind of device and (1) other limited devices and (2) devices operating on a proprietary platform.

When researching the [http://www.wirelessphiladelphia.net/ Wireless Philadelphia initiative], the members of the Harvard Law School Internet Law and Politics semniar concluded that most of the [http://hcs.harvard.edu/~cyberlaw/wiki/index.php/The_Wireless_Philadelphia_plan_will_not_adequately_bridge_the_digital_divide. people who do not have internet access also do not have computers] – so the “digital divide” seemed to represent that first hurdle of obtaining a computer. Limited devices have a value in this regard because of their potential to bridge the digital divide.

Essentially, machines with limited functionality are likely cheaper and easier to use due to their limited purpose and therefore more likely to saturate the entire market. If someone prefers or can afford a machine that only sends emails, a general purpose computer hardly seems necessary. (While mobile devices with email functionality such as [http://www.blackberry.com/ Blackberrys] are becoming increasingly prominent, one should note that [http://www.landel.com/mb1.html certain early email-only appliances] that were introduced on the market never really took off.) And in actuality, much of the democratizing effect of the Internet is achievable through only a web browser and the trend over the past few years has been to web-enable everything – from email to instant messaging to customized information portals.

Perhaps [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ MIT’s “one laptop per child” initiative] best exemplifies the low-cost, limited functionality approach: the machines lack significant storage capacity, computing power, battery life and software. The result, of course, is a computer that can be produced for just over $100. The distribution of that inexpensive laptop results in gains from widespread dissemination of existing uses of the Internet at the expense of true “experimentation” that a fully functional computer provides.

The second consideration that Benkler neglects is that specialized machines may be better at their particular task than a general purpose computer because of advantages in user interface and technology. Machines that “structure their users’ capabilities according to design requirements set by their producers and distributors” are actually designed primarily to satisfy customer demand. People who play networked video games may actually prefer the networked XBox to their networked computer. The XBox bundles together all components necessary for video games, and none that the user does not need. The proprietary platform and network used by an XBox may be necessary for the device to function as it does or for Microsoft to be willing to create the device. In the future there is every reason to think that digital movie viewers may prefer the functionality of movie download to be embedded within their home theater than using a general purpose computer to do the same. And a proprietary platform may necessary for that functionality.

The user interface and technological advantages in specialized devices and proprietary platforms could easily extend to even more interactive purposes and it is possible that users would prefer them either for cost or usability. Blackberry handheld devices are an example of an emerging technology that provides such a service. The “glorified television” experiment of WebTV may have failed for any number of reasons, including poor timing, marketing, and its particular design, but it is shortsighted to give up on the idea of a light-footprint, low-cost device that enables Internet access using technology that already exists in most homes. Linking common devices, like a video game system or a television, to the Internet seems like the most reasonable way to ease the transition into a networked society and that in and of itself creates some value.

Thus, there is little question that devices with limited functionality or specialized proprietary platforms do come some cost of creativity and experimentation – these devices may not be able to create the Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie “Endless Love” parody that has spread on the Internet or serve as a node in a peer to peer network. Regulatory restrictions on devices certainly act as an obstacle to the networked information economy, as Benkler describes. But there are benefits to specialized and limited functionality machines, whether they develop in response to regulatory restrictions or independently of them.

User talk:Ownut

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=== Herbs and Wikis ===

I was interested to find your photos of herbs on your web site.

Have you thought about integrating them into a wiki on the properties of herbs? If so, I would be interested in finding out more. - [[User:Grandpa Ruh|gr]]

Wikipedia would be a better (much more complete) source for herb 'properties'.

I will be offering permaculture seeds (and land and tools) for "Free as in Freedom" as soon as the "General Public Lease" is finished.

Chapter 1, section 2

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<table width="650">
<tr valign="top">
<td>

[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge|Chapter 1 Summary]] | [[Bulleted Chapter 1]] [[Talk:Chapter 1, section 2|Discuss Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies]]

----

== Chapter 1 Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge, section 2: Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies ==

=== Introduction ===

: [[Chapter 1]]

=== The Emergence of the Networked Information Economy ===

: [[Chapter 1, section 1]]

=== Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies ===

How we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others speak to us are core components of the shape of freedom in any society. Part II of this book provides a detailed look at how the changes in the technological, economic, and social affordances of the networked information environment affect a series of core commitments of a wide range of liberal democracies. The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies - individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and [http://mydatapages.com/social_justice.html social justice]. These values provide the vectors of political morality along which the shape and dimensions of any liberal society can be plotted. Because their practical policy implications are often contradictory, rather than complementary, the pursuit of each places certain limits on how we pursue the others, leading different liberal societies to respect them in different patterns. How much a society constrains the democratic decision-making powers of the majority in favor of individual freedom, or to what extent it pursues social justice, have always been attributes that define the political contours and nature of that society. But the economics of industrial production, and our pursuit of productivity and growth, have imposed a limit on how we can pursue any mix of arrangements to implement our commitments to freedom and justice. Singapore is commonly trotted out as an extreme example of the trade-off of freedom for welfare, but all democracies with advanced capitalist economies have made some such trade-off. Predictions of how well we will be able to feed ourselves are always an important consideration in thinking about whether, for example, to democratize wheat production or make it more egalitarian. Efforts to push workplace democracy have also often foundered on the shoals - real or imagined - of these limits, as have many plans for redistribution in the name of social justice. Market-based, proprietary production has often seemed simply too productive to tinker with. The emergence of the networked information economy promises to expand the horizons of the feasible in political imagination. Different liberal polities can pursue different mixtures of respect for different liberal commitments. However, the overarching constraint represented by the seeming necessity of the industrial model of information and cultural production has significantly shifted as an effective constraint on the pursuit of liberal commitments.

==== Enhanced Autonomy ====

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

I begin, therefore, with an analysis of the effects of networked information economy on individual autonomy. First, individuals can do more for themselves independently of the permission or cooperation of others. They can create their own expressions, and they can seek out the information they need, with substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century. Second, and no less importantly, individuals can do more in loose affiliation with others, rather than requiring stable, long-term relations, like coworker relations or participation in formal organizations, to underwrite effective cooperation. Very few individuals living in the industrial information economy could, in any realistic sense, decide to build a new Library of Alexandria of global reach, or to start an encyclopedia. As collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore qualitatively increases. The very fluidity and low commitment required of any given cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can conceive of as open to them.

These ways in which autonomy is enhanced require a fairly substantive and rich conception of autonomy as a practical lived experience, rather than the formal conception preferred by many who think of autonomy as a philosophical concept. But even from a narrower perspective, which spans a broader range of conceptions of autonomy, at a minimum we can say that individuals are less susceptible to manipulation by a legally defined class of others - the owners of communications infrastructure and media. The networked information economy provides varied alternative platforms for communication, so that it moderates the power of the traditional mass-media model, where ownership of the means of communication enables an owner to select what others view, and thereby to affect their perceptions of what they can and cannot do. Moreover, the diversity of perspectives on the way the world is and the way it could be for any given individual is qualitatively increased. This gives individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make.

==== Democracy: The Networked Public Sphere ====

The second major implication of the networked information economy is the shift it enables from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. This shift is also based on the increasing freedom individuals enjoy to participate in creating information and knowledge, and the possibilities it presents for a new public sphere to emerge alongside the commercial, mass-media markets. The idea that the Internet democratizes is hardly new. It has been a staple of writing about the Internet since the early 1990s. The relatively simple first-generation claims about the liberating effects of the Internet, summarized in the U.S. Supreme Court's celebration of its potential to make everyone a pamphleteer, came under a variety of criticisms and attacks over the course of the past half decade or so. Here, I offer a detailed analysis of how the emergence of a networked information economy in particular, as an alternative to mass media, improves the political public sphere. The first-generation critique of the democratizing effect of the Internet was based on various implications of the problem of information overload, or the Babel objection. According to the Babel objection, when everyone can speak, no one can be heard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to the reemergence of money as the distinguishing factor between statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity. The second-generation critique was that the Internet is not as decentralized as we thought in the 1990s. The emerging patterns of Internet use show that very few sites capture an exceedingly large amount of attention, and millions of sites go unnoticed. In this world, the Babel objection is perhaps avoided, but only at the expense of the very promise of the Internet as a democratic medium.

In chapters 6 and 7, I offer a detailed and updated analysis of this, perhaps the best-known and most contentious claim about the Internet's liberalizing effects. First, it is important to understand that any consideration of the democratizing effects of the Internet must measure its effects as compared to the commercial, mass-media-based public sphere, not as compared to an idealized utopia that we embraced a decade ago of how the Internet might be. Commercial mass media that have dominated the public spheres of all modern democracies have been studied extensively. They have been shown in extensive literature to exhibit a series of failures as platforms for public discourse. First, they provide a relatively limited intake basin - that is, too many observations and concerns of too many people in complex modern societies are left unobserved and unattended to by the small cadre of commercial journalists charged with perceiving the range of issues of public concern in any given society. Second, particularly where the market is concentrated, they give their owners inordinate power to shape opinion and information. This power they can either use themselves or sell to the highest bidder. And third, whenever the owners of commercial media choose not to exercise their power in this way, they then tend to program toward the inane and soothing, rather than toward that which will be politically engaging, and they tend to oversimplify complex public discussions. On the background of these limitations of the mass media, I suggest that the networked public sphere enables many more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media.

The empirical and theoretical literature about network topology and use provides answers to all the major critiques of the claim that the Internet improves the structure of the public sphere. In particular, I show how a wide range of mechanisms - starting from the simple mailing list, through static Web pages, the emergence of writable Web capabilities, and mobility - are being embedded in a social system for the collection of politically salient information, observations, and comments, and provide a platform for discourse. These platforms solve some of the basic limitations of the commercial, concentrated mass media as the core platform of the public sphere in contemporary complex democracies. They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes - the eyes of someone who could actually inject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive, and thus more engaged observers of social spaces that could potentially become subjects for political conversation; they become more engaged participants in the debates about their observations. The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization. We are seeing the emergence of new, decentralized approaches to fulfilling the watchdog function and to engaging in political debate and organization. These are being undertaken in a distinctly nonmarket form, in ways that would have been much more difficult to pursue effectively, as a standard part of the construction of the public sphere, before the networked information environment. Working through detailed examples, I try to render the optimism about the democratic advantages of the networked public sphere a fully specified argument.

The networked public sphere has also begun to respond to the information overload problem, but without re-creating the power of mass media at the points of filtering and accreditation. There are two core elements to these developments: First, we are beginning to see the emergence of nonmarket, peer-produced alternative sources of filtration and accreditation in place of the market-based alternatives. Relevance and accreditation are themselves information goods, just like software or an encyclopedia. What we are seeing on the network is that filtering for both relevance and accreditation has become the object of widespread practices of mutual pointing, of peer review, of pointing to original sources of claims, and its complement, the social practice that those who have some ability to evaluate the claims in fact do comment on them. The second element is a contingent but empirically confirmed observation of how users actually use the network. As a descriptive matter, information flow in the network is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the cacophony of information flow would suggest, and significantly less centralized than the mass media environment was. Some sites are much more visible and widely read than others. This is true both when one looks at the Web as a whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who tend to cluster. Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media - the dominance of the few visible sites. But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the mass-media-dominated public sphere. Sites cluster around communities of interest: Australian fire brigades tend to link to other Australian fire brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and to a lesser but still significant extent, to liberal political blogs. In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone. "Local" clusters - communities of interest - can provide initial vetting and "peer-review-like" qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster. Observations that are seen as significant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger ("regional") clusters. This continues until an observation makes its way to the "superstar" sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use. This path is complemented by the practice of relatively easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which creates shortcuts to wide attention. It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively why these patterns might emerge. Users tend to treat other people's choices about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for them. They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their own as to whether certain types of users - say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a specific television program - are the best predictors of what will be interesting for them. The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly.

==== Justice and Human Development ====

Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development. Because the outputs of the networked information economy are usually nonproprietary, it provides free access to a set of the basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity and the basic outputs of the information economy. From a liberal perspective concerned with justice, at a minimum, these outputs become more readily available as "finished goods" to those who are least well off. More importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating in the economy less dependent on surmounting access barriers to financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity.

From a more substantive and global perspective focused on human development, the freedom to use basic resources and capabilities allows improved participation in the production of information and information-dependent components of human development. First, and currently most advanced, the emergence of a broad range of free software utilities makes it easier for poor and middle-income countries to obtain core software capabilities. More importantly, free software enables the emergence of local capabilities to provide software services, both for national uses and as a basis for participating in a global software services industry, without need to rely on permission from multinational software companies. Scientific publication is beginning to use commons-based strategies to publish important sources of information in a way that makes the outputs freely available in poorer countries. More ambitiously, we begin to see in agricultural research a combined effort of public, nonprofit, and open-source-like efforts being developed and applied to problems of agricultural innovation. The ultimate purpose is to develop a set of basic capabilities that would allow collaboration among farmers and scientists, in both poor countries and around the globe, to develop better, more nutritious crops to improve food security throughout the poorer regions of the world. Equally ambitious, but less operationally advanced, we are beginning to see early efforts to translate this system of innovation to health-related products.

All these efforts are aimed at solving one of the most glaring problems of poverty and poor human development in the global information economy: Even as opulence increases in the wealthier economies - as information and innovation offer longer and healthier lives that are enriched by better access to information, knowledge, and culture - in many places, life expectancy is decreasing, morbidity is increasing, and illiteracy remains rampant. Some, although by no means all, of this global injustice is due to the fact that we have come to rely ever-more exclusively on proprietary business models of the industrial economy to provide some of the most basic information components of human development. As the networked information economy develops new ways of producing information, whose outputs are not treated as proprietary and exclusive but can be made available freely to everyone, it offers modest but meaningful opportunities for improving human development everywhere. We are seeing early signs of the emergence of an innovation ecosystem made of public funding, traditional nonprofits, and the newly emerging sector of peer production that is making it possible to advance human development through cooperative efforts in both rich countries and poor.

==== A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations ====

The networked information economy also allows for the emergence of a more critical and self-reflective culture. In the past decade, a number of legal scholars - Niva Elkin Koren, Terry Fisher, Larry Lessig, and Jack Balkin - have begun to examine how the Internet democratizes culture. Following this work and rooted in the deliberative strand of democratic theory, I suggest that the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable. Together, these mean that we are seeing the emergence of a new folk culture - a practice that has been largely suppressed in the industrial era of cultural production - where many more of us participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world around us. These practices make their practitioners better "readers" of their own culture and more self-reflective and critical of the culture they occupy, thereby enabling them to become more self-reflective participants in conversations within that culture. This also allows individuals much greater freedom to participate in tugging and pulling at the cultural creations of others, "glomming on" to them, as Balkin puts it, and making the culture they occupy more their own than was possible with mass-media culture. In these senses, we can say that culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory.

Throughout much of this book, I underscore the increased capabilities of individuals as the core driving social force behind the networked information economy. This heightened individual capacity has raised concerns by many that the Internet further fragments community, continuing the long trend of industrialization. A substantial body of empirical literature suggests, however, that we are in fact using the Internet largely at the expense of television, and that this exchange is a good one from the perspective of social ties. We use the Internet to keep in touch with family and intimate friends, both geographically proximate and distant. To the extent we do see a shift in social ties, it is because, in addition to strengthening our strong bonds, we are also increasing the range and diversity of weaker connections. Following Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman, I suggest that we have become more adept at filling some of the same emotional and context-generating functions that have traditionally been associated with the importance of community with a network of overlapping social ties that are limited in duration or intensity.

=== Four Methodological Comments ===

: [[Chapter 1, section 3]]

=== The Stakes of It All: The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment ===

: [[Chapter 1, section 4]]

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge|Chapter 1 Summary]] | [[Bulleted Chapter 1]] [[Talk:Chapter 1, section 2|Discuss Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies]]
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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[9. Justice and Development|Chapter 9: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 9|Discuss Justice and Development: Introduction]]

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== Chapter 9: Justice and Development ==

=== Introduction ===

How will the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket, commons-based production in the information economy affect questions of distribution and human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, very little. Hunger, disease, and deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or class stratification will not be solved by a more decentralized, nonproprietary information production system. Without clean water, basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universal practical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings as fundamentally deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-based society will have little effect on the billions living in poverty or deprivation, either in the rich world, or, more urgently and deeply, in poor and middle-income economies. There is enough truth in this pessimistic answer to require us to tread lightly in embracing the belief that the shift to a networked information economy can indeed have meaningful effects in the domain of justice and human development.

Despite the caution required in overstating the role that the networked information economy can play in solving issues of justice, it is important to recognize that information, knowledge, and culture are core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and biological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovation and access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthy life. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, to democratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities. Economic growth itself is critically dependent on innovation and information. For all these reasons, information policy has become a critical element of development policy and the question of how societies attain and distribute human welfare and well-being. Access to knowledge has become central to human development. The emergence of the networked information economy offers definable opportunities for improvement in the normative domain of justice, as it does for freedom, by comparison to what was achievable in the industrial information economy.

We can analyze the implications of the emergence of the networked information economy for justice or equality within two quite different frames. The first is liberal, and concerned primarily with some form of equality of opportunity. The second is social-democratic, or development oriented, and focused on universal provision of a substantial set of elements of human well-being. The availability of information from nonmarket sources and the range of opportunities to act within a nonproprietary production environment improve distribution in both these frameworks, but in different ways. Despite the differences, within both frameworks the effect crystallizes into one of access-access to opportunities for one's own action, and access to the outputs and inputs of the information economy. The industrial economy creates cost barriers and transactional-institutional barriers to both these domains. The networked information economy reduces both types of barriers, or creates alternative paths around them. It thereby equalizes, to some extent, both the opportunities to participate as an economic actor and the practical capacity to partake of the fruits of the increasingly information-based global economy.

The opportunities that the network information economy offers, however, often run counter to the central policy drive of both the United States and the European Union in the international trade and intellectual property systems. These two major powers have systematically pushed for ever-stronger proprietary protection and increasing reliance on strong patents, copyrights, and similar exclusive rights as the core information policy for growth and development. Chapter 2 explains why such a policy is suspect from a purely economic perspective concerned with optimizing innovation. A system that relies too heavily on proprietary approaches to information production is not, however, merely inefficient. It is unjust. Proprietary rights are designed to elicit signals of people's willingness and ability to pay. In the presence of extreme distribution differences like those that characterize the global economy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A system that signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to these innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay, overrepresents welfare gains of the wealthy and underrepresents welfare gains of the poor. Twenty thousand American teenagers can simply afford, and will be willing to pay, much more for acne medication than the more than a million Africans who die of malaria every year can afford to pay for a vaccine. A system that relies too heavily on proprietary models for managing information production and exchange is unjust because it is geared toward serving small welfare increases for people who can pay a lot for incremental improvements in welfare, and against providing large welfare increases for people who cannot pay for what they need.

=== Liberal Theories of Justice and the Networked Information Economy ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 1]]

=== Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 2]]

=== Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 3]]

=== Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 4]]

=== Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 5]]

=== Commons-Based Research for Food and Medicines ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 6]]

=== Commons-Based Strategies for Development: Conclusion ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 7]]

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[9. Justice and Development|Chapter 9: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 9|Discuss Justice and Development: Introduction]]

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== Knowledge-based universe ==

While not yet in widespread use, the phrase '''knowledge-based universe''' is increasingly being used to describe the universe of knowledge knowledg that is accessible in digital form via the Internet, and to incorporate the recognition of this universe as a realm of the natural world. Unlike the material universe, the knowledge-based universe if governed by the laws and properties of information and networks; in particular, abundance in this universe is not constrained by the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation|Chapter 2: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 2, section 2|Discuss The Effects of Exclusive Rights]]

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== Chapter 2 Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation, section 2: The Effects of Exclusive Rights ==

=== Introduction ===

: [[Chapter 2]]

=== The Diversity of Strategies in our Current Information Production System ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 1]]

=== The Effects of Exclusive Rights ===

Once we recognize that there are diverse strategies of appropriation for information production, we come to see a new source of inefficiency caused by strong "intellectual property"-type rights. Recall that in the mainstream analysis, exclusive rights always cause static inefficiency - that is, they allow producers to charge positive prices for products (information) that have a zero marginal cost. Exclusive rights have a more ambiguous effect dynamically. They raise the expected returns from information production, and thereby are thought to induce investment in information production and innovation. However, they also increase the costs of information inputs. If existing innovations are more likely covered by patent, then current producers will more likely have to pay for innovations or uses that in the past would have been available freely from the public domain. Whether, overall, any given regulatory change that increases the scope of exclusive rights improves or undermines new innovation therefore depends on whether, given the level of appropriability that preceded it, it increased input costs more or less than it increased the prospect of being paid for one's outputs.

The diversity of appropriation strategies adds one more kink to this story. Consider the following very simple hypothetical. Imagine an industry that produces "infowidgets." There are ten firms in the business. Two of them are infowidget publishers on the Romantic Maximizer model. They produce infowidgets as finished goods, and sell them based on patent. Six firms produce infowidgets on supply-side (Know-How) or demand-side (Scholarly Lawyer) effects: they make their Realwidgets or Servicewidgets more efficient or desirable to consumers, respectively. Two firms are nonprofit infowidget producers that exist on a fixed, philanthropically endowed income. Each firm produces five infowidgets, for a total market supply of fifty. Now imagine a change in law that increases exclusivity. Assume that this is a change in law that, absent diversity of appropriation, would be considered efficient. Say it increases input costs by 10 percent and appropriability by 20 percent, for a net expected gain of 10 percent. The two infowidget publishers would each see a 10 percent net gain, and let us assume that this would cause each to increase its efforts by 10 percent and produce 10 percent more infowidgets. Looking at these two firms alone, the change in law caused an increase from ten infowidgets to eleven - a gain for the policy change. Looking at the market as a whole, however, eight firms see an increase of 10 percent in costs, and no gain in appropriability. This is because none of these firms actually relies on exclusive rights to appropriate its product's value. If, commensurate with our assumption for the publishers, we assume that this results in a decline in effort and productivity of 10 percent for the eight firms, we would see these firms decline from forty infowidgets to thirty-six, and total market production would decline from fifty infowidgets to forty-seven.

Another kind of effect for the change in law may be to persuade some of the firms to shift strategies or to consolidate. Imagine, for example, that most of the inputs required by the two publishers were owned by the other infowidget publisher. If the two firms merged into one Mickey, each could use the outputs of the other at its marginal cost - zero - instead of at its exclusive-rights market price. The increase in exclusive rights would then not affect the merged firm's costs, only the costs of outside firms that would have to buy the merged firm's outputs from the market. Given this dynamic, strong exclusive rights drive concentration of inventory owners. We see this very clearly in the increasing sizes of inventory-based firms like Disney. Moreover, the increased appropriability in the exclusive-rights market will likely shift some firms at the margin of the nonproprietary business models to adopt proprietary business models. This, in turn, will increase the amount of information available only from proprietary sources. The feedback effect will further accelerate the rise in information input costs, increasing the gains from shifting to a proprietary strategy and to consolidating larger inventories with new production.

Given diverse strategies, the primary unambiguous effect of increasing the scope and force of exclusive rights is to shape the population of business strategies. Strong exclusive rights increase the attractiveness of exclusive-rights-based strategies at the expense of nonproprietary strategies, whether market-based or nonmarket based. They also increase the value and attraction of consolidation of large inventories of existing information with new production.

=== When Information Production Meets the Computer Network ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 3]]

=== Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 4]]

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation|Chapter 2: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 2, section 2|Discuss The Effects of Exclusive Rights]]
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[[Table of Contents]], [[9. Justice and Development|Chapter 9: Summary]]

== Chapter 9 Justice and Development. section 5: Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development ==

=== Introduction ===

: [[Chapter 9]]

=== Liberal Theories of Justice and the Networked Information Economy ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 1]]

=== Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 2]]

=== Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 3]]

=== Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 4]]

=== Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development ===

The mainstream understanding of intellectual property by its dominant policy-making institutions-the Patent Office and U.S. trade representative in the United States, the Commission in the European Union, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) systems internationally-is that strong protection is good, and stronger protection is better. In development and trade policy, this translates into a belief that the primary mechanism for knowledge transfer and development in a global information economy is for all nations, developing as well as developed, to ratchet up their intellectual property law standards to fit the most protective regimes adopted in the United States and Europe. As a practical political matter, the congruence between the United States and the European Union in this area means that this basic understanding is expressed in the international trade system, in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its TRIPS agreement, and in international intellectual property treaties, through the WIPO. The next few segments present an alternative view. Intellectual property as an institution is substantially more ambiguous in its effects on information production than the steady drive toward expansive rights would suggest. The full argument is in chapter 2.

Intellectual property is particularly harmful to net information importers. In our present world trade system, these are the poor and middle-income nations. Like all users of information protected by exclusive rights, these nations are required by strong intellectual property rights to pay more than the marginal cost of the information at the time that they buy it. In the standard argument, this is intended to give producers incentives to create information that users want. Given the relative poverty of these countries, however, practically none of the intellectual-property-dependent producers develop products specifically with returns from poor or even middle-income markets in mind. The pharmaceutical industry receives about 5 percent of its global revenues from low- and middle-income countries. That is why we have so little investment in drugs for diseases that affect only those parts of the world. It is why most agricultural research that has focused on agriculture in poorer areas of the world has been public sector and nonprofit. Under these conditions, the above-marginal-cost prices paid in these poorer countries are purely regressive redistribution. The information, knowledge, and information-embedded goods paid for would have been developed in expectation of rich world rents alone. The prospects of rents from poorer countries do not affect their development. They do not affect either the rate or the direction of research and development. They simply place some of the rents that pay for technology development in the rich countries on consumers in poor and middle-income countries. The morality of this redistribution from the world's poor to the world's rich has never been confronted or defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply goes unnoticed. When crises in access to information-embedded goods do appear-such as in the AIDS/HIV access to medicines crisis-these are seldom tied to our basic institutional choice. In our trade policies, Americans and Europeans push for ever-stronger protection. We thereby systematically benefit those who own much of the stock of usable human knowledge. We do so at the direct expense of those who need access to knowledge in order to feed themselves and heal their sick.

The practical politics of the international intellectual property and trade regime make it very difficult to reverse the trend toward ever-increasing exclusive property protections. The economic returns to exclusive proprietary rights in information are highly concentrated in the hands of those who own such rights. The costs are widely diffuse in the populations of both the developing and developed world. The basic inefficiency of excessive property protection is difficult to understand by comparison to the intuitive, but mistaken, Economics 101 belief that property is good, more property is better, and intellectual property must be the same. The result is that pressures on the governments that represent exporters of intellectual property rights permissions-in particular, the United States and the European Union-come in this area mostly from the owners, and they continuously push for ever-stronger rights. Monopoly is a good thing to have if you can get it. Its value for rent extraction is no less valuable for a database or patent-based company than it is for the dictator's nephew in a banana republic. However, its value to these supplicants does not make it any more efficient or desirable.

The political landscape is, however, gradually beginning to change. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, and particularly in the wake of the urgency with which the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa has infused the debate over access to medicines, there has been a growing public interest advocacy movement focused on the intellectual property trade regime. This movement is, however, confronted with a highly playable system. A victory for developing world access in one round in the TRIPS context always leaves other places to construct mechanisms for exclusivity. Bilateral trade negotiations are one domain that is beginning to play an important role. In these, the United States or the European Union can force a rice- or cotton-exporting country to concede a commitment to strong intellectual property protection in exchange for favorable treatment for their core export. The intellectual property exporting nations can then go to WIPO, and push for new treaties based on the emerging international practice of bilateral agreements. This, in turn, would cycle back and be generalized and enforced through the trade regimes. Another approach is for the exporting nations to change their own laws, and then drive higher standards elsewhere in the name of "harmonization." Because the international trade and intellectual property system is highly "playable" and manipulable in these ways, systematic resistance to the expansion of intellectual property laws is difficult.

The promise of the commons-based strategies explored in the remainder of this chapter is that they can be implemented without changes in law-either national or international. They are paths that the emerging networked information economy has opened to individuals, nonprofits, and public-sector organizations that want to help in improving human development in the poorer regions of the world to take action on their own. As with decentralized speech for democratic discourse, and collaborative production by individuals of the information environment they occupy as autonomous agents, here too we begin to see that self-help and cooperative action outside the proprietary system offer an opportunity for those who wish to pursue it. In this case, it is an opportunity to achieve a more just distribution of the world's resources and a set of meaningful improvements in human development. Some of these solutions are "commons-based," in the sense that they rely on free access to existing information that is in the commons, and they facilitate further use and development of that information and those information-embedded goods and tools by releasing their information outputs openly, and managing them as a commons, rather than as property. Some of the solutions are specifically peer-production solutions. We see this most clearly in software, and to some extent in the more radical proposals for scientific publication. I will also explore here the viability of peer-production efforts in agricultural and biomedical innovation, although in those fields, commons-based approaches grafted onto traditional public-sector and nonprofit organizations at present hold the more clearly articulated alternatives.

==== Software ====

The software industry offers a baseline case because of the proven large scope for peer production in free software. As in other information-intensive industries, government funding and research have played an enormously important role, and university research provides much of the basic science. However, the relative role of individuals, nonprofits, and nonproprietary market producers is larger in software than in the other sectors. First, two-thirds of revenues derived from software in the United States are from services and do not depend on proprietary exclusion. Like IBM's "Linux-related services" category, for which the company claimed more than two billion dollars of revenue for 2003, these services do not depend on exclusion from the software, but on charging for service relationships.//7 Second, some of the most basic elements of the software environment-like standards and protocols-are developed in nonprofit associations, like the Internet Engineering Taskforce or the World Wide Web Consortium. Third, the role of individuals engaged in peer production-the free and open-source software development communities-is very large. Together, these make for an organizational ecology highly conducive to nonproprietary production, whose outputs can be freely usable around the globe. The other sectors have some degree of similar components, and commons-based strategies for development can focus on filling in the missing components and on leveraging nonproprietary components already in place.

In the context of development, free software has the potential to play two distinct and significant roles. The first is offering low-cost access to high-performing software for developing nations. The second is creating the potential for participation in software markets based on human ability, even without access to a stock of exclusive rights in existing software. At present, there is a movement in both developing and the most advanced economies to increase reliance on free software. In the United States, the Presidential Technology Advisory Commission advised the president in 2000 to increase use of free software in mission-critical applications, arguing the high quality and dependability of such systems. To the extent that quality, reliability, and ease of self-customization are consistently better with certain free software products, they are attractive to developing-country governments for the same reasons that they are to the governments of developed countries. In the context of developing nations, the primary additional arguments that have been made include cost, transparency, freedom from reliance on a single foreign source (read, Microsoft), and the potential of local software programmers to learn the program, acquire skills, and therefore easily enter the global market with services and applications for free software.//8 The question of cost, despite the confusion that often arises from the word "free," is not obvious. It depends to some extent on the last hope-that local software developers will become skilled in the free software platforms. The cost of software to any enterprise includes the extent, cost, and efficacy with which the software can be maintained, upgraded, and fixed when errors occur. Free software may or may not involve an up-front charge. Even if it does not, that does not make it cost-free. However, free software enables an open market in free software servicing, which in turn improves and lowers the cost of servicing the software over time. More important, because the software is open for all to see and because developer communities are often multinational, local developers can come, learn the software, and become relatively low-cost software service providers for their own government. This, in turn, helps realize the low-cost promise over and above the licensing fees avoided. Other arguments in favor of government procurement of free software focus on the value of transparency of software used for public purposes. The basic thrust of these arguments is that free software makes it possible for constituents to monitor the behavior of machines used in governments, to make sure that they are designed to do what they are publicly reported to do. The most significant manifestation of this sentiment in the United States is the hitherto-unsuccessful, but fairly persistent effort to require states to utilize voting machines that use free software, or at a minimum, to use software whose source code is open for public inspection. This is a consideration that, if valid, is equally suitable for developing nations. The concern with independence from a single foreign provider, in the case of operating systems, is again not purely a developing-nation concern. Just as the United States required American Marconi to transfer its assets to an American company, RCA, so that it would not be dependent for a critical infrastructure on a foreign provider, other countries may have similar concerns about Microsoft. Again, to the extent that this is a valid concern, it is so for rich nations as much as it is for poor, with the exceptions of the European Union and Japan, which likely do have bargaining power with Microsoft to a degree that smaller markets do not.

The last and quite distinct potential gain is the possibility of creating a context and an anchor for a free software development sector based on service. This was cited as the primary reason behind Brazil's significant push to use free software in government departments and in telecenters that the federal government is setting up to provide Internet service access to some of its poorer and more remote areas. Software services represent a very large industry. In the United States, software services are an industry roughly twice the size of the movie and video industry. Software developers from low- and middle-income countries can participate in the growing free software segment of this market by using their skills alone. Unlike with service for the proprietary domain, they need not buy licenses to learn and practice the services. Moreover, if Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and other major developing countries were to rely heavily on free software, then the "internal market," within the developing world, for free software-related services would become very substantial. Building public-sector demand for these services would be one place to start. Moreover, because free software development is a global phenomenon, free software developers who learn their skills within the developing world would be able to export those skills elsewhere. Just as India's call centers leverage the country's colonial past with its resulting broad availability of English speakers, so too countries like Brazil can leverage their active free software development community to provide software services for free software platforms anywhere in the developed and developing worlds. With free software, the developing-world providers can compete as equals. They do not need access to permissions to operate. Their relationships need not replicate the "outsourcing" model so common in proprietary industries, where permission to work on a project is the point of control over the ability to do so. There will still be branding issues that undoubtedly will affect access to developed markets. However, there will be no baseline constraints of minimal capital necessary to enter the market and try to develop a reputation for reliability. As a development strategy, then, utilization of free software achieves transfer of information-embedded goods for free or at low cost. It also transfers information about the nature of the product and its operation-the source code. Finally, it enables transfer, at least potentially, of opportunities for learning by doing and of opportunities for participating in the global market. These would depend on knowledge of a free software platform that anyone is free to learn, rather than on access to financial capital or intellectual property inventories as preconditions to effective participation.

==== Scientific Publication ====

Scientific publication is a second sector where a nonproprietary strategy can be implemented readily and is already developing to supplant the proprietary model. Here, the existing market structure is quite odd in a way that likely makes it unstable. Authoring and peer review, the two core value-creating activities, are done by scientists who perform neither task in expectation of royalties or payment. The model of most publications, however, is highly proprietary. A small number of business organizations, like Elsevier Science, control most of the publications. Alongside them, professional associations of scientists also publish their major journals using a proprietary model. Universities, whose scientists need access to the papers, incur substantial cost burdens to pay for the publications as a basic input into their own new work. While the effects of this odd system are heavily felt in universities in rich countries, the burden of subscription rates that go into the thousands of dollars per title make access to up-to-date scientific research prohibitive for universities and scientists working in poorer economies. Nonproprietary solutions are already beginning to emerge in this space. They fall into two large clusters.

The first cluster is closer to the traditional peer-review publication model. It uses Internet communications to streamline the editorial and peer-review system, but still depends on a small, salaried editorial staff. Instead of relying on subscription payments, it relies on other forms of payments that do not require charging a price for the outputs. In the case of the purely nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLoS), the sources of revenue combine author's payments for publication, philanthropic support, and university memberships. In the case of the for-profit BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, it is a combination of author payments, university memberships, and a variety of customized derivative products like subscription-based literature reviews and customized electronic update services. Author payments-fees authors must pay to have their work published-are built into the cost of scientific research and included in grant applications. In other words, they are intended to be publicly funded. Indeed, in 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major funding agency for biomedical science in the United States, announced a requirement that all NIH-funded research be made freely available on the Web within twelve months of publication. Both PLoS and BioMed Central have waiver processes for scientists who cannot pay the publication fees. The articles on both systems are available immediately for free on the Internet. The model exists. It works internally and is sustainable as such. What is left in determining the overall weight that these open-access journals will have in the landscape of scientific publication is the relatively conservative nature of universities themselves. The established journals, like ''Science'' or ''Nature'', still carry substantially more prestige than the new journals. As long as this is the case, and as long as hiring and promotion decisions continue to be based on the prestige of the journal in which a scientist's work is published, the ability of the new journals to replace the traditional ones will be curtailed. Some of the established journals, however, are operated by professional associations of scientists. There is an internal tension between the interests of the associations in securing their revenue and the growing interest of scientists in open-access publication. Combined with the apparent economic sustainability of the open-access journals, it seems that some of these established journals will likely shift over to the open-access model. At a minimum, policy interventions like those proposed by the NIH will force traditional publications to adapt their business model by making access free after a few months. The point here, however, is not to predict the overall likely success of open-access journals. It is to combine them with what we have seen happening in software as another example of a reorganization of the components of the industrial structure of an information production system. Individual scientists, government funding agencies, nonprofits and foundations, and nonproprietary commercial business models can create the same good-scientific publication-but without the cost barrier that the old model imposed on access to its fruits. Such a reorientation would significantly improve the access of universities and physicians in developing nations to the most advanced scientific publication.

The second approach to scientific publication parallels more closely free software development and peer production. This is typified by ArXiv and the emerging practices of self-archiving or self-publishing. ArXiv.org is an online repository of working papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science. It started out focusing on physics, and that is where it has become the sine qua non of publication in some subdisciplines. The archive does not perform review except for technical format compliance. Quality control is maintained by postpublication review and commentary, as well as by hosting updated versions of the papers with explanations (provided by authors) of the changes. It is likely that the reason ArXiv.org has become so successful in physics is the very small and highly specialized nature of the discipline. The universe of potential readers is small, and their capacity to distinguish good arguments from bad is high. Reputation effects of poor publications are likely immediate.

While ArXiv offers a single repository, a much broader approach has been the developing practice of self-archiving. Academics post their completed work on their own Web sites and make it available freely. The primary limitation of this mechanism is the absence of an easy, single location where one can search for papers on a topic of concern. And yet we are already seeing the emergence of tagging standards and protocols that allow anyone to search the universe of self-archived materials. Once completed, such a development process would in principle render archiving by single points of reference unnecessary. The University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, for example, has developed a protocol called OAIster (pronounced like oyster, with the tagline "find the pearls"), which combines the acronym of Open Archives Initiative with the "ster" ending made popular in reference to peer-to-peer distribution technologies since Napster (AIMster, Grokster, Friendster, and the like). The basic impulse of the Open Archives Initiative is to develop a sufficiently refined set of meta-data tags that would allow anyone who archives their materials with OAI-compliant tagging to be searched easily, quickly, and accurately on the Web. In that case, a general Web search becomes a targeted academic search in a "database" of scientific publications. However, the database is actually a network of self-created, small personal databases that comply with a common tagging and search standard. Again, my point here is not to explore the details of one or another of these approaches. If scientists and other academics adopt this approach of self-archiving coupled with standardized interfaces for global, well-delimited searches, the problem of lack of access to academic publication because of their high-cost publication will be eliminated.

Other types of documents, for example, primary- and secondary-education textbooks, are in a much more rudimentary stage of the development of peer-production models. First, it should be recognized that responses to illiteracy and low educational completion in the poorer areas of the world are largely a result of lack of schoolteachers, physical infrastructure for classrooms, demand for children's schooling among parents who are themselves illiterate, and lack of effectively enforced compulsory education policy. The cost of textbooks contributes only a portion of the problem of cost. The opportunity cost of children's labor is probably the largest factor. Nonetheless, outdated materials and poor quality of teaching materials are often cited as one limit on the educational achievement of those who do attend school. The costs of books, school fees, uniforms, and stationery can amount to 20-30 percent of a family's income.//9 The component of the problem contributed by the teaching materials may be alleviated by innovative approaches to textbook and education materials authoring. Chapter 4 already discussed some textbook initiatives. The most successful commons-based textbook authoring project, which is also the most relevant from the perspective of development, is the South African project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST). The FHSST initiative is more narrowly focused than the broader efforts of Wikibooks or the California initiative, more managed, and more successful. Nonetheless, in three years of substantial effort by a group of dedicated volunteers who administer the project, its product is one physics high school text, and advanced drafts of two other science texts. The main constraint on the efficacy of collaborative textbook authoring is that compliance requirements imposed by education ministries tend to require a great degree of coherence, which constrains the degree of modularity that these text-authoring projects adopt. The relatively large-grained contributions required limit the number of contributors, slowing the process. The future of these efforts is therefore likely to be determined by the extent to which their designers are able to find ways to make finer-grained modules without losing the coherence required for primary- and secondary-education texts. Texts at the post-secondary level likely present less of a problem, because of the greater freedom instructors have to select texts. This allows an initiative like MIT's Open Courseware Initiative to succeed. That initiative provides syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets, etc. from over 1,100 courses. The basic creators of the materials are paid academics who produce these materials for one of their core professional roles: teaching college- and graduate-level courses. The content is, by and large, a "side-effect" of teaching. What is left to be done is to integrate, create easy interfaces and search capabilities, and so forth. The university funds these functions through its own resources and dedicated grant funding. In the context of MIT, then, these functions are performed on a traditional model-a large, well-funded nonprofit provides an important public good through the application of full-time staff aimed at non-wealth-maximizing goals. The critical point here was the radical departure of MIT from the emerging culture of the 1980s and 1990s in American academia. When other universities were thinking of "distance education" in terms of selling access to taped lectures and materials so as to raise new revenue, MIT thought of what its basic mandate to advance knowledge and educate students in a networked environment entailed. The answer was to give anyone, anywhere, access to the teaching materials of some of the best minds in the world. As an intervention in the ecology of free knowledge and information and an act of leadership among universities, the MIT initiative was therefore a major event. As a model for organizational innovation in the domain of information production generally and the creation of educational resources in particular, it was less significant.

Software and academic publication, then, offer the two most advanced examples of commons-based strategies employed in a sector whose outputs are important to development, in ways that improve access to basic information, knowledge, and information-embedded tools. Building on these basic cases, we can begin to see how similar strategies can be employed to create a substantial set of commons-based solutions that could improve the distribution of information germane to human development.

=== Commons-Based Research for Food and Medicines ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 6]]

=== Commons-Based Strategies for Development: Conclusion ===

: [[Chapter 9, section 7]]

=== Chapter 9: Notes ===

: [[Chapter 9: Notes]]

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A system of production, distribution, and consumption of information goods characterized by a centralized commercial action carried out through a one-to-many distribution and dependent on market strategies. (page 3 of WON)

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge|Chapter 1 Summary]] | [[Bulleted Chapter 1]] [[Talk:Chapter 1, section 4|Discuss The Stakes of It All: The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment]]

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== Chapter 1 Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge, section 4: The Stakes of It All: The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment ==

=== Introduction ===

: [[Chapter 1]]

=== The Emergence of the Networked Information Economy ===

: [[Chapter 1, section 1]]

=== Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies ===

: [[Chapter 1, section 2]]

=== Four Methodological Comments ===

: [[Chapter 1, section 3]]

=== The Stakes of It All: The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment ===

No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this technological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications - like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications services giants - to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made. None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocation lying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents' assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at stake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book. I offer no reassurances, however, that any of this will in fact come to pass.

The battle over the relative salience of the proprietary, industrial models of information production and exchange and the emerging networked information economy is being carried out in the domain of the institutional ecology of the digital environment. In a wide range of contexts, a similar set of institutional questions is being contested: To what extent will resources necessary for information production and exchange be governed as a commons, free for all to use and biased in their availability in favor of none? To what extent will these resources be entirely proprietary, and available only to those functioning within the market or within traditional forms of well-funded nonmarket action like the state and organized philanthropy? We see this battle played out at all layers of the information environment: the physical devices and network channels necessary to communicate; the existing information and cultural resources out of which new statements must be made; and the logical resources - the software and standards - necessary to translate what human beings want to say to each other into signals that machines can process and transmit. Its central question is whether there will, or will not, be a core common infrastructure that is governed as a commons and therefore available to anyone who wishes to participate in the networked information environment outside of the market-based, proprietary framework.

This is not to say that property is in some sense inherently bad. Property, together with contract, is the core institutional component of markets, and a core institutional element of liberal societies. It is what enables sellers to extract prices from buyers, and buyers to know that when they pay, they will be secure in their ability to use what they bought. It underlies our capacity to plan actions that require use of resources that, without exclusivity, would be unavailable for us to use. But property also constrains action. The rules of property are circumscribed and intended to elicit a particular datum - willingness and ability to pay for exclusive control over a resource. They constrain what one person or another can do with regard to a resource; that is, use it in some ways but not others, reveal or hide information with regard to it, and so forth. These constraints are necessary so that people must transact with each other through markets, rather than through force or social networks, but they do so at the expense of constraining action outside of the market to the extent that it depends on access to these resources.

Commons are another core institutional component of freedom of action in free societies, but they are structured to enable action that is not based on exclusive control over the resources necessary for action. For example, I can plan an outdoor party with some degree of certainty by renting a private garden or beach, through the property system. Alternatively, I can plan to meet my friends on a public beach or at Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. I can buy an easement from my neighbor to reach a nearby river, or I can walk around her property using the public road that makes up our transportation commons. Each institutional framework - property and commons - allows for a certain freedom of action and a certain degree of predictability of access to resources. Their complementary coexistence and relative salience as institutional frameworks for action determine the relative reach of the market and the domain of nonmarket action, both individual and social, in the resources they govern and the activities that depend on access to those resources. Now that material conditions have enabled the emergence of greater scope for nonmarket action, the scope and existence of a core common infrastructure that includes the basic resources necessary to produce and exchange information will shape the degree to which individuals will be able to act in all the ways that I describe as central to the emergence of a networked information economy and the freedoms it makes possible.

At the physical layer, the transition to broadband has been accompanied by a more concentrated market structure for physical wires and connections, and less regulation of the degree to which owners can control the flow of information on their networks. The emergence of open wireless networks, based on "spectrum commons," counteracts this trend to some extent, as does the current apparent business practice of broadband owners not to use their ownership to control the flow of information over their networks. Efforts to overcome the broadband market concentration through the development of municipal broadband networks are currently highly contested in legislation and courts. The single most threatening development at the physical layer has been an effort driven primarily by Hollywood, over the past few years, to require the manufacturers of computation devices to design their systems so as to enforce the copyright claims and permissions imposed by the owners of digital copyrighted works. Should this effort succeed, the core characteristic of computers - that they are general-purpose devices whose abilities can be configured and changed over time by their owners as uses and preferences change - will be abandoned in favor of machines that can be trusted to perform according to factory specifications, irrespective of what their owners wish. The primary reason that these laws have not yet passed, and are unlikely to pass, is that the computer hardware and software, and electronics and telecommunications industries all understand that such a law would undermine their innovation and creativity. At the logical layer, we are seeing a concerted effort, again headed primarily by Hollywood and the recording industry, to shape the software and standards to make sure that digitally encoded cultural products can continue to be sold as packaged goods. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the assault on peer-to-peer technologies are the most obvious in this regard.

More generally information, knowledge, and culture are being subjected to a second enclosure movement, as James Boyle has recently explored in depth. The freedom of action for individuals who wish to produce information, knowledge, and culture is being systematically curtailed in order to secure the economic returns demanded by the manufacturers of the industrial information economy. A rich literature in law has developed in response to this increasing enclosure over the past twenty years. It started with David Lange's evocative exploration of the public domain and Pamela Samuelson's prescient critique of the application of copyright to computer programs and digital materials, and continued through Jessica Litman's work on the public domain and digital copyright and Boyle's exploration of the basic romantic assumptions underlying our emerging "intellectual property" construct and the need for an environmentalist framework for preserving the public domain. It reached its most eloquent expression in Lawrence Lessig's arguments for the centrality of free exchange of ideas and information to our most creative endeavors, and his diagnoses of the destructive effects of the present enclosure movement. This growing skepticism among legal academics has been matched by a long-standing skepticism among economists (to which I devote much discussion in chapter 2). The lack of either analytic or empirical foundation for the regulatory drive toward ever-stronger proprietary rights has not, however, resulted in a transformed politics of the regulation of intellectual production. Only recently have we begun to see a politics of information policy and "intellectual property" emerge from a combination of popular politics among computer engineers, college students, and activists concerned with the global poor; a reorientation of traditional media advocates; and a very gradual realization by high-technology firms that rules pushed by Hollywood can impede the growth of computer-based businesses. This political countermovement is tied to quite basic characteristics of the technology of computer communications, and to the persistent and growing social practices of sharing - some, like p2p (peer-to-peer) file sharing, in direct opposition to proprietary claims; others, increasingly, are instances of the emerging practices of making information on nonproprietary models and of individuals sharing what they themselves made in social, rather than market patterns. These economic and social forces are pushing at each other in opposite directions, and each is trying to mold the legal environment to better accommodate its requirements. We still stand at a point where information production could be regulated so that, for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice.

Social and economic organization is not infinitely malleable. Neither is it always equally open to affirmative design. The actual practices of human interaction with information, knowledge, and culture and with production and consumption are the consequence of a feedback effect between social practices, economic organization, technological affordances, and formal constraints on behavior through law and similar institutional forms. These components of the constraints and affordances of human behavior tend to adapt dynamically to each other, so that the tension between the technological affordances, the social and economic practices, and the law are often not too great. During periods of stability, these components of the structure within which human beings live are mostly aligned and mutually reinforce each other, but the stability is subject to shock at any one of these dimensions. Sometimes shock can come in the form of economic crisis, as it did in the United States during the Great Depression. Often it can come from an external physical threat to social institutions, like a war. Sometimes, though probably rarely, it can come from law, as, some would argue, it came from the desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Sometimes it can come from technology; the introduction of print was such a perturbation, as was, surely, the steam engine. The introduction of the high-capacity mechanical presses and telegraph ushered in the era of mass media. The introduction of radio created a similar perturbation, which for a brief moment destabilized the mass-media model, but quickly converged to it. In each case, the period of perturbation offered more opportunities and greater risks than the periods of relative stability. During periods of perturbation, more of the ways in which society organizes itself are up for grabs; more can be renegotiated, as the various other components of human stability adjust to the changes. To borrow Stephen Jay Gould's term from evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of punctuated equilibria. The periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long. A mere twenty-five years passed between the invention of radio and its adaptation to the mass-media model. A similar period passed between the introduction of telephony and its adoption of the monopoly utility form that enabled only one-to-one limited communications. In each of these periods, various paths could have been taken. Radio showed us even within the past century how, in some societies, different paths were in fact taken and then sustained over decades. After a period of instability, however, the various elements of human behavioral constraint and affordances settled on a new stable alignment. During periods of stability, we can probably hope for little more than tinkering at the edges of the human condition.

This book is offered, then, as a challenge to contemporary liberal democracies. We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new environment will in some significant measure depend on policy choices that we make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice - a choice about how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and economic conditions. As economic policy, allowing yesterday's winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow's economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom, and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable.

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge|Chapter 1 Summary]] | [[Bulleted Chapter 1]] [[Talk:Chapter 1, section 4|Discuss The Stakes of It All: The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment]]
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7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere

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Chapter 2, section 4

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User:Imres

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I am [http://www.ime.usp.br/~is/ Imre Simon] a (retired) Professor of Computer Science at the University of São Paulo.

I am a great admirer of Yochai Benkler's work and would like to understand better the aspects and mechanisms of Social Production. I have a particular interest in the concepts of nonrival commons, the evolution of information and the Open Access movement to the Scientific Literature.

From its inception in 2003 until July of 2007 I coordinated a project of incentivating and facilitating the Cooperative Construction of Open Contents at the [http://incubadora.fapesp.br/ Virtual Incubator of Digital Contents].

I also teach a discipline in Portuguese, since 1999, which tries to analyse the Social Impacts of the Internet: [http://conhecimento.incubadora.fapesp.br/ Informação, Comunicação e a Sociedade do Conhecimento].

In 2007 I am coordinating, with Gilson Schwartz and Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, a series of seven debates based on Yochai's book (in Portuguese) at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo. The debates are webcast and later archived on the web. The series is documented at [http://WoN.incubadora.fapesp.br/ Ciclo Temático sobre a Riqueza das Redes].

I also have lots of other interests in Theoretical Computer Science but I guess that "that's another story" from the WoN perspective.

Domain toolkit

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User:Kchswince

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kchswince is an IT professional who holds an MBA with a MIS concentration and is a non-practicing CPA.
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--[[User:Kchswince|Kchswince]]

Summary Chapter 2

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3. Peer Production and Sharing

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UN NGO community

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A Perspective on Limiting Device Functionality

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Main Page

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This Wiki is an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment based on Yochai Benkler's book, ''The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom'', available under a
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike] license.

== Read the book==

''in different formats:''
* [[Table of Contents|Wiki]]: summaries, commentary, downloads
* [[Download PDFs of the book|PDF]] - in the original book format or in a paper-friendly version
* [http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks HTML] - formatted in separate chapters, in an easier-to-read format
* [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/sisu_manifest.html Searchable version available in multiple formats] ( [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/toc.html html], XML, opendocument [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/opendocument.odt ODF], pdf ([http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/landscape.pdf landscape], [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/portrait.pdf portrait]), [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/plain.txt plaintext], [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/concordance.html concordance ] ), SiSU
* [[Remixes]]
* Hardcopy: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300110561/sr=8-1/qid=1140626021/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-8246423-0950353?%5Fencoding=UTF8 from Amazon] or [http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300110561 from Yale Press]or [http://worldcat.org/oclc/61881089 Find it in a library]
* [[Translations]]

== Reviews and Blogs ==

* ''[http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003368.shtml Lessig blog],'' by Lawrence Lessig, 15Apr06.
* ''[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2dd72ff4-0cbb-11db-84fd-0000779e2340.html Financial Times],'' Net Gains, by Paul Miller, 07Jul06.
* ''[http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2266603,00.html Times Online],'' Netizens Awake, by Paul Duguid, 07Jul06.
* ''[http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/jason_calacanis.php Rough Type],'' Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream, by Nicholas Carr, 19Jul06. See also ''[http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/benkler_on_cala.php Benkler's reply],'' 28Jul06.
* ''[http://www.newstatesman.com/200609040057 New Statesman],'' Power to the People, by Kenneth Cukier, 04Sep06.
* ''[http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=765 German Law Journal],'' by James Brink, 01Oct06.
* ''[http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/669 Public Knowledge],'' by Gigi Sohn, 03Oct06.''
* ''[http://pmat.ciph.free.fr/breve.php3?id_breve=21 Rue Descartes],'' by Thierry Leterre, Feb07 (French journal edited by the ''[http://www.ciph.org/ Collège international de philosophie]'').
* ''[http://jyo3.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/networked-information-economy/ Networked Information Economy],'' by jyo3, Jul07 (Reading, review and discussion as part of the ''[http://neteconomics.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/class-notes-week-6/ Digital Media Program at the UW]'').
*''[http://denoer.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/072907-wealth-of-nations/ denoer blog],'' by Randa Williams, 29Jul07.
*''[http://jwliston.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/power-to-the-people/ Power To The People] by JohnWayne Liston, Jul07 (Net e-conomics: ''[http://depts.washington.edu/mcdm/ MC Digital Media; University Washington]'')
*''[http://mgm5.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/a-moment-of-opportunity/ A Moment of Opportunity],'' by MegMcG, 29Jul07 (Net e-conomics: ''[http://depts.washington.edu/mcdm/ MC Digital Media; University of Washington]'')
*''[http://coreygil.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/book-review-the-wealth-of-networks/ The Wealth of Networks] by Corey Gil, Jul07 (Net e-conomics: ''[http://depts.washington.edu/mcdm/ MC Digital Media; University Washington]'')
*''[http://nancydick.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/wealth-of-networks/ Wealth of Networks] by Nancy Dick, Jul07 (Net e-conomics: ''[http://depts.washington.edu/mcdm/ MC Digital Media; University Washington]'')
*''[http://rolphc.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/review-the-wealth-of-networks/ Wealth of Networks] by Carrie Rolph, Jul07 (Net e-conomics: ''[http://depts.washington.edu/mcdm/ MC Digital Media; University Washington]'')
* ''[http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/garfield/archive/2007/08/08/4118.html Weekly KM Blog],'' by Stan Garfield, 08Aug07.

== Discussions ==

* [http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/30/introduction-the-wealth-of-networks-seminar/ Crooked Timber] (Net-seminar)
* [http://neteconomics.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/class-notes-week-6/ NetEconomics] (graduate seminar at UW-Seattle)

== Interviews ==

* ''[http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/04/24/the-wealth-of-networks OpenBusiness]''
* ''[http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-copyrightlaw/benkler_3487.jsp OpenDemocracy]''
* ''[http://zero.newassignment.net/filed/yochai_benkler Assignment Zero]''
* Video interview @ Wizards of OS 4: question [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR1Vizvecsw 1], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dg9pDny99E 2], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_c_pRSFs34 3], & [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQEOniepWc 4]. September 14, 2006.

== Video Resources==

* [http://www.scribemedia.org/2007/03/19/yochai-benkler/ Yochai Benkler @ Freedom to Connect, March 2007]
* [http://pdf.blip.tv/file/237315/ Yochai Benkler @ Personal Democracy Forum, 2007]
* [http://www.archive.org/details/YochaiBenkler Yochai Benkler @ the Center for American Progress, May 31, 2006]

== Audio Resources==

* [http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~jhall/Yochai_Benkler_Boalt_27Apr2006.mp3 Yochai Benkler @ Boalt Hall (Berkeley School of Law), April 2006]

== Using this wiki ==

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place for at least five things:

# Collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book (see [[Table of Contents]])
# Collaborate on writing commentaries and elaborating and refining the presentation
# Provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials:
#* those used in the book's notes
#* and resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating
# Describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes
#* The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind.
# Demonstrate and discover what is valuable in a learning platform
#* Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.
#* Through creative, systematic and interactive uses of this wiki, we hope to enhance our individual and collective skills & experience in a wiki world

=== Growing this Wiki ===

* [[Growing this Wiki]]: Ideas for how to help the wiki grow and be useful

=== A Wiki User's Guide ===

See the [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide User's Guide] for usage and configuration help.

Please use the [[Sandbox]] for experiments and to get acquainted with this wiki.

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