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

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2007-08-19T13:47:32Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of NzdNvi, changed back to last version by Yochai

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Main Page

2007-08-18T10:34:26Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Usome, changed back to last version by Ptj

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 ==

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Talk:Main Page

2007-08-18T10:33:30Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Usome, changed back to last version by Ptj

'Hi everyone:
My name is Chris Gondek and I am the producer and host of a podcast called "The Invisible Hand". Professor Benkler is my guest for the 4/22/06 show and we discuss the ideas in "The Wealth of Networks". If you are interested in listening to the show, here is the link: http://www.theinvisiblehandpodcast.com/The_Invisible_Hand_Episode_23.mp3

An interview about Yochai Benkler's new book can be found at [http://www.openbusiness.cc Openbusiness.cc]

''I'm parking this here temporarily, but maybe we should start an 'Audio' or 'Media' page?

Audio from Benkler's talk, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", given at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law on 27 April 2006: http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~jhall/Yochai_Benkler_Boalt_27Apr2006.mp3

[[User:Ownut]]'s beginnings of a summary of this talk:

Social production is sustainable, growing, efficient Mode of Production that is bad for the current model.

Freedom, human agency and autonomy increase when owners allow workers to 'play' with otherwise proprietary resources.

Food and Drug security through Open Source farming.

The complete book has now been made available as a digitally-voiced podcast at:
http://www.babblebooks.com/podcasts/WealthOfNetworks

==PDB or FB2 versions of this book?==
I would like to read it with FBReader. Anyone created .pdb or .fb2 versions of this book? If not, maybe I will find time to do that some day... [[User:Guaka|Guaka]] 20:45, 25 August 2006 (PDT)

== I like this!!! ==

Great site. So many useful info.
Really perfect!!! I'll bookmark!

Current events

2007-08-18T10:32:57Z

Yochai:

== August 19, 2006 - San Francisco Bay Area Nonprofit Boot Camp ==

: '''Craigslist Foundation''' [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org] is hosting the Third Annual '''San Francisco Bay Area Boot Camp''' to be held at the University of California, Berkeley on Saturday, August 19, 2006. The Berkeley event will have almoost three times the number of participants as in New York and twice as many thematic tracks.

:* '''Related link'''

:: [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/index.php?page=Bayarea Third Annual San Francisco Bay Area Boot Camp]

== June 21 - September 22, 2006 - Free Summer School ==

: With an opening theme of '''Discovering and Gathering a Wealth of Knowledge''' and a commitment to the '''United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development''' (2005-2014), the '''International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World''' (2001-2010) and related United Nations Decades, a '''Free Summer School''' will be in session between the 2006 Summer Solstice on '''June 21''' and the Fall Equinox on '''September 22'''. The Free Summer School is being hosted by '''Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles''' [http://www.seasons-of-peace.net] in support of the '''[[NGO Committee on Education]]''' of '''CONGO''' - the '''C'''onference '''O'''f '''N'''on-'''G'''overnmental '''O'''rganizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations [http://www.ngocongo.org]. The NGO Committee on Education has made a decade-long commitment to support the United Nations Decade on Sustainable Development, and is seeking to draw on, and gather together, the vast wealth of knowledge and experience in the hearts and minds of people and organizations that make up the rapidly evolving NGO community / civil society.

: The Free Summer School is being hosted on a holistic evolving information ecology platform that has emerged in the course of the systematic use and promotion of information and communications technology and appreciation of the transformative significance of the zero-based properties of information - zero mass, zero physical size, and virtually zero travel time - that are the "material" basis for the '''zero marginal cost''' of digital goods.

:* '''Related pages'''

:: [[Free Summer School]], [[NGO Committee on Education]]

== June 10, 2006 - New York Nonprofit Boot Camp ==

: '''Craigslist Foundation''' [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org] will be hosting the first New York City '''Nonprofit Boot Camp''' on Saturday June 10, 2006 at the NYU Stern School of Business, an all day event from 9 am to 9 pm. The registration fee of $50 includes all meals and a closing reception. For more details on this event and to register, visit [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/index.php?page=NY www.craigslistfoundation.org/index.php?page=NY]

: Craigslist Foundation has organized several very successful Boot Camps in San Francisco, and the first New York City Boot Camp promises to be a remarkable gathering of people and organizations who are invvolved in a nonprofit networked information economy.

:* '''Related pages'''

:: [[New York Nonprofit Boot Camp]]

== May 13-26, 2006 - UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues ==

: The Fifth Session of the '''UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues''' is taking place at UN Headquarters in New York. There is active interest in the development of an online forum in support of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the '''Second International Decade on the World's Indigenous People'''. See [[organizational domains]] for a preliminary outline of a framework for such an online forum. For more information on the Permanent forum, visit [http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii]

:* '''Related pages'''

:: [[Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues]]

== April 14, 2006 - Launch of The Wealth of Networks ==

6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
540 W. 21st Street, New York, NY

Please join Yale Professor [[Yochai Benkler]] for the launch of his new book, "The Wealth of Networks". The book explains how a new form of distributed collaboration is transforming the world economy, heralded by innovations such as:

:# Open Source software like Linux and Apache that have surpassed commercial software made by huge corporations
:# A free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia called Wikipedia that rivals Encyclopedia Britannica, and
:# Volunteer research projects like NASA Clicks that are as accurate as the work of paid scientists.

Benkler does not see these projects as isolated examples, but rather as exemplars of an emerging mode of economic production. His book shows why labor done outside the constraints of free markets and giant corporations can still have a huge impact on the economy and social relations. He argues that a "third mode of production" offers the promise of a more free society, but only if we make the right collective decisions.

:The evening started at 6pm with wine, cheese, and informal conversation. At 7pm Jonah Peretti, Eyebeam's Director of R&D, introduced Benkler and gave a quick tour of important and emerging open source and collaborative projects. Then at 7:15pm, Benkler gave a brief talk presenting the core ideas of his new book.

The Wealth of Networks was available for purchase in the Eyebeam bookstore the night of the event and can also be ordered on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300110561/103-6520487-9511867?v=glance&n=283155

This event was open to the public free of charge.

(based on the Eyebeam website)

{{Footer}}

NGO Committee on Education

2007-08-18T10:32:26Z

Yochai:

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== NGO Committee on Education ==

The '''NGO Committee on Education''' is a substantive committee of '''CONGO''' - the '''C'''onference '''O'''f '''N'''on-'''G'''overnmental '''O'''rganizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations [http://www.ngocongo.org]. The Committee has made a commitment to supporting the '''United Nations Decade on Education for Sustainable Development''' (2005-2014) as well as related decades, and is developing a network of web sites to this end. The information architecture of the networks is based on properties and principles of a [[networked information economy]], and on a prototype open source and Creative Commons framework for [[organizational domains]], with the goal of gathering, compiling and sharing a vast collective wealth of knowledge - and building the foundations of a '''Common Wealth''', co-created in a rapidly-evolving intelligent networked universe in which abundance is not constrained by the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

=== United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development ===

Launched in April 2005, the [[United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development]] [http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=27234&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html] presents an extensive and vital challenge. The forty-one chapters of '''Agenda 21''' [http://www.un-documents.net/agenda21.htm] - the landmark agreement reached at the 1992 '''Earth Summit''' in Rio de Janeiro - together with references to education in Agenda 21 [http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/eea.htm] offer an indication of the scope that a comprehensive curriculum needs to cover.

* '''Related documents'''

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/unche.htm Report of the UN Conference on the Human Environment] - Stockholm, 1972

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/wecd-ocf.htm Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment & Development] - 1987

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/agenda21.htm Agenda 21] - Rio de Janeiro, 1992

:: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a21-36.htm Promoting Education, Public Awareness And Training] Agenda 21, Chapter 36

:: * [http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/eea.htm References to education and awareness in Agenda 21]

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a57r254.htm United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development] - General Assembly resolution 57/254

* '''Related web sites'''

: * [http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=27234&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development] UNESCO

: * [http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/ Division of Sustainable Development] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs

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

Just over the halfway point of the '''International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World''' (2001-2010), many of the visions and signs of an immense outpouring of hope and expectations for a Millennium of Peace may appear to have been "blown away" by the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on Septemer 11, 2001 and the subsequent declaration and progressive escalation of a global war on terror.

War is clearly unsustainable - and most acutely so when conducted with overwhelming force and massive destruction; where massive areas of land, including critical wetlands are contaminated for many millennia with highly-radioactive depleted uranium, whose toxicity represents a threat to the life and health of people born and living in the contaminated areas.

In its attention to the Decade for a Culture of Peace, will pay particular attention to key elements of a culture of peace: Peace within our selves, peace between people, and peace with the earth, and to the an evolving set of values, traditions, principles and practices that are increasingly beng articulated and embraced by representatives of diverse faith - and non-faith - in which love and respect for all people is extended to embrace love and respect for the Earth and for the entrie community of species and sentient beings.

* '''Related documents'''

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a4r290.htm Essentials of Peace] General Assembly resolution 290 (IV)

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a5r377.htm Uniting for Peace] General Assembly resolution 377 (V)

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a53r243a.htm Declaration on a Culture of Peace] General Assembly resolution 53/243 A

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a53r243b.htm Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace] General Assembly resolution 53/243 B

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a53r25.htm International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010)] General Assembly resolution 53/25

* '''Related web sites'''

: * [http://decade-culture-of-peace.org World Report on a Culture of Peace]

==== International Day of Peace ====

In its resolution 55/282 [http://www.un-documents.net/a55r282.htm] of September 7, 2001, the UN General Assembly established September 21 as the '''International Day of Peace'''. Since 982, it had been observed on observed, on the third Tuesday of September every year. The International Day of Peace has been very widely observed in local, national and global events, and for many in the NGO community - and particularly among NGOs affiliated with the UN Department of Public Information - is considered the high point of the year and a key time, following the Annual DPI/NGO Conference and at the beginning of a new General Assembly session, to uphold the preamble, purposes and principles of the United Nations [http://www.un-documents.net/ch-ppp.htm].

* '''Related documents'''

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/ch-ppp.htm United Nations Charter: Preamble, Purpose and Principles]

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a55r282.htm International Day of Peace] General Assembly resolution 55/282

* '''Related web sites'''

: * [http://www.internationaldayofpeace.org/ International Day of Peace] We, The Peoples Initiative, Pathways to Peace & International Day of Peace NGO Committee at the UN

==== Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence ====

The '''Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence''' - January 30 through April 4 - commemorates the deaths of '''Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi''' and '''Rev. Dr. Matin Luther King, Jr.'''. The Gandhi-King Seasons for Nonviolence web site [http://www.gandhi-king-season.net] web site was initially developed for the '''New York Task Force for the Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence''' and has continued to evolve under the auspices of '''Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles''' [http://www.seasons-of-peace.net]. The database-generated web site incorporates a ten week curriculum in Nonviolence and the teachings of Gandhi and King, and incorporates a set of form-based templates for participants to share information and comments.

Annual events commemorating the Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence are held at United Nations headquarters in New York, and around the world.

* '''Related web sites'''

: * [http://www.gandhi-king-season.net Gandhi-King Season for Non-Violence]

: * [http://www.seasons-of-peace.net Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles]

==== Peace Cubes ====

The twin Virtual Light & Colour Cubes - dedicated as '''Peace Cubes''' at the United Nations Peace Bell [http://habitat.igc.org/one-light/dedicate.htm] on March 20, 1997 at an Earthday on the Equinox on the Internet ceremony - are a remarkable and fascinating virtual, elementary mathematical entities in the form of cubes with dimensions of red, green and blue - the primary colours of light.

Each cube contains all colours, and the colour at any point in the cube is equal to the sum of the coordinates of the point within a three-dimensional mathematics of colour. The sum of the coordinates is expressed as '''#rrggbb''' - i.e. it is based on the '''HTML''' languuge of colour, a concatenation of three two-digit hexadecimal numbers between 00 and ff (0 and 63 in decimal terms), that represent, respectively, the intensity of red, green and blue light.

The visual effect of mathematically-defined cubes are striking - even in the two-dimensional images that have been generated to date - and the six faces of the virtual light and colour cube can be understood as the six faces of a three-dimensional colour space.

: http://habitat.igc.org/reconcile/open-600-012.jpg

* '''Related Web sites'''

: * [http://habitat.igc.org/one-light/dedicate.htm Dedication of the Peace Cube]

: * [http://habitat.igc.org/bridges/cubes.htm Journey of the Peace Cubes]

: * [http://habitat.igc.org/one-light Light Cubes]

: * [http://habitat.igc.org/bridges Digital Bridges in Peace exhibit]

: * [http://habitat.igc.org/one-light/template.htm Templates to print and assemble Peace Cubes / Light Cubes] - free download

=== International Decade of Action: Water for Life ===

Water is crucial for sustainable development, including the preservation of our natural environment and the alleviation of poverty and hunger. Water is indispensable for human health and well-being.

The United Nations General Assembly, in December 2003, proclaimed the years 2005 to 2015 as the International Decade for Action 'Water for Life'.

A decade of action! The primary goal of the 'Water for Life' Decade is to promote efforts to fulfill international commitments made on water and water-related issues by 2015.

* '''Related documents'''

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a21-18.htm Agenda 21, Chapter 18: Protection of the Quality and Supply of Freshwater Resources] Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1992

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/harare.htm Report of the Expert Group Meeting on Strategic Approaches to Freshwater Management] Harare, Zimbabwe, 1998

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a58r217.htm International Decade for Action, Water for Life, 2005-2015] General Assembly resolution 58/217

* ''' Related web sites'''

: * [http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/ International Decade for Action, Water for Life] UN site

: * [http://www.unesco.org/water/ Water portal] UNESCO

=== United Nations Literacy Decade ===

The United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012) is a centerpiece of '''Education for All''', the flagship campaign of UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Cultural & Scientific Organizations - and literacy also must serve as a cornerstone for education for sustainable development.

* '''Related documents'''

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/jomtien.htm World Declaration on Education For All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs]. Jomtein, Thailand, 1990

:: * [http://www.un-documents.net/jomteinf.htm Framework For Action: Meeting Basic Learning Needs]

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/dakarfa.htm Dakar Framework for Action. Education For All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments], Dakar, Senegal, 2000

: * [http://www.un-documents.net/a56r116.htm United Nations Literacy Decade], General Assembly sesolution 56/116, 2001

* '''Related web site'''

: * [http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/ UNESCO - Education For All]

: * [http://www.unesco.org/education/litdecade/ UNESCO - United Nations Literacy Decade]

=== Second International Decade of the World's Indigenous People ===

The '''Second International Decade of the World's Indigenous People''' (2005-2014) represents the second major formal phase of relationships between indigenous communities and the United Nations, in which the 1992 Earth Summit was a major catalyst, and that has included the '''Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People''' and the establishment, in July 2000, of the '''United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues''' as an advisory body to the UN '''Economic and Social Council'''.

The NGO Committee on Education recognizes the immense significance of indigenous knowledge and experience in living in balance with, and respect for, the earth and '''all my relations''' and their ways of seeing, listening to and learning from the earth and from their spiritual traditions can offer invaluable lessons for all.

=== United Nations documents ===

An initial element of the web site for the NGO Committee on Education consists of the compilation of key United Nations documents relating to sustainable development, peace, education, human rights, etc. To date over 500 documents - global conference agreements, General Assembly resolutions, conventions, declarations, conventions and treaties - have been gathered in a full text database format from which HTML versions of the documents have been generated [http://www.un-documents.net www.un-documents.net] - in many cases requiring OCR conversion of scanned pdf files downloaded from the '''UN Official Document System''' [http://documents.un.org/], '''UNBISNET''' [http://unbisnet.un.org] and elsewhere - and with the addition of hyperlinks to references cited in the documents.

=== Free Summer School ===

A '''[[Free Summer School]]''' - or more accurately, an open network of Free Summer Schools - with a focus on learning, teaching and gathering a body of knowledge on sustainable development, peace and the larger freedoms of a knowledge-based universe will be in session from '''June 20, 2006''' - the 2006 Summer Solstice - through '''September 22, 2005''' - the Fall Equinox.

Participation in the Free Summer School will be free, and participants are invited to define their own curriculum and modalities of learning and participation, to make use of and discover more about free, participatory, open source and Creative Commons platforms - wikis, blogs, email lists, databases, web sites, and more - and to join or convene one or more cooperation circles focusing an their areas of special interests and concerns.

The culmination of the '''Free Summer School''' will take place on the '''International Day of Peace''' - September 21, 2006. All participants are invited to share what they have learned - and what they still need to learn - about knowledge-based response to the challenges of sustainable and regenerative development and of establishing a culture of peace.

== Prospective Collaboration with other NGO Committees ==

Given the far-reaching scope of education for sustainable development, the NGO Committee on Education is actively exploring opportunities for collaboration with other of the substantive committees of CONGO - there are twenty-one Committees in New York, ten in Geneva and seven in Vienna - with the goal of tapping into the wealth of knowledge within the [[UN NGO community]] on a broad range of issues relating to education for sustainable development.

=== NGO Committee on Sustainable Development ===

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

=== NGO Committee on the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People ===

==== Second International Decade of the World's Indigenous People ====

==== Indigenous Issues on Sustainable Development ====

==== United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues ====

=== NGO Committee on the Status of Women ===

==== Education of the Girl Child ====

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Free Summer School

2007-08-18T10:31:56Z

Yochai:

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==Free Summer School==

With an opening theme of '''Discovering and Gathering a Wealth of Knowledge''' and a commitment to the '''United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development''' (2005-2014), the '''International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World''' (2001-2010) and related United Nations Decades, a '''Free Summer School''' will be in session between the 2006 Summer Solstice on '''June 21''' and the Fall Equinox on '''September 22'''. The Free Summer School is being hosted by '''Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles''' [http://www.seasons-of-peace.net] in support of the '''[[NGO Committee on Education]]''' of '''CONGO''' - the '''C'''onference '''O'''f '''N'''on-'''G'''overnmental '''O'''rganizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations [http://www.ngocongo.org]. The NGO Committee on Education has made a decade-long commitment to support the United Nations Decade on Sustainable Development, and is seeking to draw on, and gather together, the vast wealth of knowledge and experience in the hearts and minds of people and organizations that make up the rapidly evolving NGO community / civil society.

The Free Summer School is being hosted on a holistic evolving information ecology platform that has emerged in the course of the systematic use and promotion of information and communications technology and an appreciation of the transformative significance of the nature of the [[knowledge-based universe]], including the zero-based properties of information - zero mass, zero physical size, and virtually zero travel time - that are the "material" basis for the '''zero marginal cost''' of digital goods and that essentially free wealth in this universe from the constraints of the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

=== Why? ===

Almost twenty years since the landmark publication of '''Our Common Future''' [http://www.un-documents.net/wecd-ocf.htm] - the Report of the World Comission on Environment and Development - that put the concept of '''sustainable development''' on the global agenda and served as the catalyst for the 1992 '''Earth Summit''', the challenges of the '''interlocking crises''' [http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-ov.htm#1.2] - poverty, energy, water, habitat destruction, etc. - remain as immense as ever. Meanwhile, more than halfway through the Decade for a Culture of Peace, the declaration and continuing escalation of a global war on terror has substantially overshadowed the visions and hopes for a Millennium of Peace that were prevalent at the beginning of the Decade - with devastating long-term human and environmental consequences.

The last two decades, however, have also seen a remarkable emergence of access to a vast, previously unexplored, virtually infinite, virtually free universe - the digital knowledge-based universe - of which the Internet - the World Wide Web - is the most visible manifestation. Access to this knowledge-based universe has transformed our ability to find, gather and participate in the organization and publication of unprecedented amounts of information, including the ability to describe and portray relationship between the dimensions of sustainability.

=== What? ===

A free experimental learning and teaching space with an opening theme of '''Growing a Wealth of Knowledge: Digital Bridges and Sustainable Development''' in support of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and related Decades and an opportunity to learn and teach about any and all aspects of sustainable and regenerative development and to discover and explore the nature and properties of the knowledge-based universe.

=== When? ===

The Free Summer School will be in session throughout the summer of 2006 - beginning on the '''Summer Solstice''' - June 20 - through the '''International Day of Peace''' on September 21 to the '''Fall Equinox''' on the following day, September 22, 2006.

=== Where? ===

The Free Summer School allows people to participate - and to set up one or more nodes of the Free Summer School - wherever they are. Internet access, while not being a precondition for participation will clearly be invaluable; participants with Internet access are encouraged to assist those without access to acquire the capacity to connect.

=== Who? ===

Invitation to participate in a Free Summer School is open to all people who are concerned with the fate of the Earth and the community of life on Earth. The very young through the very old, rich and poor, men and women, students, teachers, activists, indigenous people, people of faith, artists, writers, cartographers, wiki workers, bloggers, web-site designers and developers, script writers - in Perl and Java - visionaries, free spirits, gardeners, farmers and more - from all corners of the Earth.

=== How? ===

Participants are free to define or discover their own ways of participating and to work cooperatively - in peer production modalities - with any online space established as nodes of the Free Summer School and to contribute to the design, development and uses of free and open source, Creative Commons platforms for [[organizational domains]].

==== Registration ====

===== In this wiki space =====

An easy way to register is to do it directly on this wiki - if you have not already done so - and to create or edit your profile to declare your participation in the Free Summer School in your description of yourself and your interests and concerns. Or your can simply edit this section, and add your name, with a link to your User page right beneath this paragraph so that others can easily see that you are part of the Free Summer School.

===== Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles =====

You can also register at the site of '''[http://www.seasons-of-peace.net Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles]''', where you will be able to share such contact information as you wish

==== Cooperation circles ====

You are invited to join an existing '''cooperation circle''' of people who share your areas of substantive, thematic, sectoral or cross-cutting concerns or interests, or to convene one or more new cooperation circles if the circles you need do not yet exist, and to invite others to join.

==== Blogs ====

If you already have one or more '''blogs''', please share your experience and learning process in your blog posts. If you haven't yet created a blog, consider trying it out as a space that you can use as a public log of what you need to learn, and what you are learning - whether it is about sustainable and regenerative developent, a culture of peace, water, indigenous people and their cultures and ways of knowledge, the world of wikis, the knowledge-based universe or observations about the ways you are best able to learn and to teach. If you are writing about the Free Summer School, you might want to include your blog - or other blogs of interest - in the list below.

* '''Blogs of possible interest'''

: [http://www.kathryncramer.org Kathy Cramer - Open Source Intelligence Operations and Wildcat Cartography]

==== Common data protocols ====

==== Wiki work ====

The Free Summer School is an invitation to learn about working in '''wiki spaces''' - keeping in mind that the most direct way to lean the ways of wiki is to contribute - whether it is comments, ideas, observations, wiki links, and external links, images, etc. or to correct spelling & syntax errors, or to enhance. If you are a novice, you might begin simply by clicking on '''Edit page''' and just taking a look at the wiki codes / tags on the page. Or you can take a step further, and ediot the page, at which time you will begin to learn about the simplified formatting codes for this wiki space. You might consider writing a brief description of yourself on your User page once you have registered. Some may prefer to begin by reading through the [[Help:Contents|Help]] pages - it is your choice. You may experience a key breakthough when you follow your first '''red link''' - a link to an as yet non-existent page on this wiki - and take responsibility for articulating the initial definition of the page's title, and perhaps also for the seeding of additional pages for concepts or entities that may also derserve their own page.

* '''Wiki sites of possible interest'''

: [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide Wiki user guide - Wikipedia]

: [http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki Access to Knowledge - Yale A2K Conference wiki]

: [http://www.thetransitioner.org/wiki The Transitioner - Transitioning the World with Collective Intelligence]

: [http://www.globalvillages.info/ OurCulture/GlobalVillages]

==== Open Space Technology ====

Participants are encouraged to make use of '''Open Space Technology''' as a framework for group consultation, planning and decision-making, and to explore, share and develop online interactive open space platforms that can offer an ongoing space for follow-up to in-person or conference call-based Open Space meetings

* '''Related links'''

: [http://www.openspaceworld.org/news/world-story Open Space Technology - A World Story]

: [http://springbranch.us/index.php?section=1 What Is Open Space Technology? - springbranch]

: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology Open Space Technology - Wikipedia]

==== Nonprofit Boot Camps ====

For those who have the opportunity, participation in one or both of the full day '''Nonprofit Boot Camps''' being organized by '''Craigslist Foundation''' [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org] - on June 10 in New York, and on August 19 in Berkeley, California - is highly recommended at what promises to be wonderful learning and networking opportuntities. The New York City event will be available via podcasting and streaming audio that will be available for download after the event.

* '''Related links'''

: [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/index.php?page=NY New York Nonprofit Boot Camp - June 10]

: [http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/index.php?page=Bayarea Bay Area Nonprofit Boot Camp August 19]

=== Recommended reading ===

* Action Plan for the Human Environment. Stockholm, 1972 http://www.un-documents.net/unche.htm

* Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. http://www.un-documents.net/wecd-ocf.htm

* The Rio Declaration on Environment & Development http://www.un-documents.net/rio-dec.htm

* Agenda 21. Rio de Janeiro, 1992. http://www.un-documents.net/agenda21.htm

: * References to education and awareness in Agenda 21 http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/eea.htm

* The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler. New Haven, CT, 2006. http://habitat.igc.org/wealth-of-networks

* ''Please add your recommendations here''

=== Recommended web sites ===

* ''Please add your recommendations here''

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2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation

2007-08-18T10:31:27Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Xy3P4s, changed back to last version by Ptj

↑ [[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)
'''

9. Justice and Development

2007-08-18T10:31:02Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Pv4E1u, changed back to last version by Ptj

[[Table Of Contents]]

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_9.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Chapter 9|Chapter 9, Wiki format]]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 9|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]

==Summary of the chapter==

Professor Benkler specifically contemplates the influence of burgeoning non-market common-based production on the issue of justice and development.

Current dominant market-based production lays its foundation on the economic incentive for production and innovation. It relies on the proprietary protection to create exclusive rights as the core policy for growth and development. However, the system has negative effects on the issue of distribution.

Starting from an overview of the theories of justice associated with liberalism. Professor Benkler argues that as long as we admit that poverty or plight could come from situations (bad luck) and not just a result of personal choices (responsitivity). Certain arrangements of wealth redistribution may be necessary to promote justice.

The issue of unequal distribution of wealth creates gross injustice at the international level. It is obvious for the distribution of food and medicine. Adolescents in America buy many kinds of medicines for acne and can afford it, while thousands of children in Africa and Asia die from diseases that can be cured easily by modern medicine but they cannot afford it. Furthermore, the market-based economy creates incentives for innovation to serve the needs of the rich and ignore the needs of the poor. More researches are conducted to cure minor diseases in the wealthy North rather than considering life-threatening deceases in the poor South.

Professor Benkler contends that accusing private corporations is not only useless but also unfair. Directors in such companies have fiduciary duties to maximise their shareholders’ wealth. The injustice result is the aggregate effect of the market-based production economy.

The common-based production economy provides an alternative to the market-based economy to generate innovations and productions that can satisfy the needs of the poor. Professor Benkler analyses different types of goods and provides an account about how common-based information economy may help to ameliorate the growing gap. For example, the MIT Open Courseware initiative provides students and teachers around the world with free and easy access to the knowledge generated by one of the best institutions in the world.

Food and medicine are the most urgent needs of developing countries. Current innovations in the agricultural biotechnological industry are increasingly relying on the private sector. Their innovations are protected by patent rights which prevents poor countries from using them as unaffordable. The common-based production model could also provide promising results in reversing such a trend. Efforts like PIPRA (Public Intellectual Property for Agriculture) or BIOS (Biotechnology Innovation for an Open Society) serve as examples for non-profit-driven research and overcome patent barriers created by the market-based economy.
In the area of medical science, efforts have been made to increase research regarding developing countries health issues. A proposed experiment at the University of Indiana-Purdue University at Indianapolis provides simple, low-cost kits for training students in chemical synthesis to conduct experiments with a view to treating diseases in the developing countries. With enough redundancy across classrooms and institutions around the world, useful drugs might be invented to help developing countries.

The common-based production economy was made possible through the effect of the cheap communication framework provided by the Internet. Professor Benkler shows how the rich North could generate information and innovations for the poor South. However, what Internet could achieve is not only allowing more researchers to help developing countries, but also have an empowerment effect on the developing world. Professor Benkler mentioned that the insufficiency of food and drugs in many third-world nations is not only caused by the high prices but also caused by malfunctioning transportation and distribution. Bad governance has been identified by the World Bank as the major reason that cripples developing countries from development. Systemic corruption will jeopardize any efforts to help local people in these countries. The most vivid example is the GlaxoSmithKline case. In the year of 2002, Glaxo provided cheaper drugs treating patients with HIV in African countries but these drugs were resold at higher price in Europe by corrupted government officials in the African countries. Though the use of internet, information about local governments operations could be more easily observed by the people. For developing countries that have passed the threshold of having access to internet, such as China or India, the effect of empowerment of the people can be observed even under censorship. For other countries that cannot afford the basic infrastructure of having access to the Internet, the effort to create cheaper infrastructure has already been launched. MIT cooperated with a Taiwanese computer manufacturing company, Quanta, to manufacture cheap computers in order to allow “One Laptop Per Child” in developing countries. Only through empowerment of the people in the developing countries, can developing world really come up with their own way to rescue themselves out from the vicious circle.
Professor Benkler raises an important question in this chapter. He asks: “ What has Wikipedia got to do with the 49 percent of the population of Congo that lacks sustainable access to improve water resources?” He answers this question by how the new common-based production information economy in the developed countries can produce more goods and innovations to benefit the developing countries. The common-based economy could also come up with programs such as the MIT-Quanta “One Child Per Laptop” initiative to allow people in the developing countries to have cheaper and easier access to knowledge and find out their own way of development. The current infrastructure of the internet, dominated by companies such as Microsoft and Intel, is itself a problem. Endless coerced upgrading practices protected by the Intellectual Property system and formidable network externality make the infrastructure of internet towards an unaffordable direction for the poor South. More efforts should be made to allow cheaper alternatives to be generated by the common-based information economy.

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

Benkler sorts liberal theories of justice into buckets, based on how they explain the sources of inequality. The three primary explanations are (1) luck, (2) responsibility, and (3) structure. The main thesis of this section is that the networked information economy offers concrete improvements over proprietary market economies along all three lines of liberal theories of justice.

====Luck====

Luck refers to “reasons for the poverty of an individual that are beyond his or her control, and that are part of that individual’s lot in life unaffected by his or her choices or actions.”

John Rawls - [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674017722/sr=8-2/qid=1146499104/ref=sr_1_2/104-2322222-6539953?%5Fencoding=UTF8 A Theory of Justice (amazon)], or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_JusticeA Theory of Justice (wikipedia)]

Benkler's use of Rawls' work is rooted in three of Rawls' principles.
* First, Rawls starts from the foundational assumption that the poorest people are in their condition only because of dumb luck.
* Second, Rawls is famous for his "difference principal," which proposes that society should provide those worst off with the benefits of redistribution or growth of wealth.
* Third, Rawls uses a thought experiment called the "Veil of Innocence" to propose a mechanism to maximize justice for all members of society. Rawls proposes that principles of justice would be maximized when established from behind a theoretical “veil of innocence,” where “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.” Only then would parties unselfishly maximize the probability that no member of society would experience poverty or injustice.

Benkler's observations:
* If we were to rationally distribute our resources behind the "veil of innocence," we would make rationale decisions, but would not distribute wealth exactly equally. We will trade overall productivity to help the worst cases, but we won't, and shouldn't, make the huge sacrifices in productivity necessary for a totally equal system.

 

====Responsibility====

Responsibility refers to “causes for the poverty of an individual that can be traced back to his or her actions or choices.

Robert Nozick - [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465097200/qid=1146501412/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-2322222-6539953?v=glance&s=books Anarchy, State and Utopia (amazon)] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy%2C_State%2C_and_UtopiaAnarchy, State and Utopia (wikipedia)]

Nozick is famous for his Entitlement Theory, which contains three principles:

* Transfer principle: Property acquired freely from others who in turn acquired the property in a just way is to be considered justly acquired.
* Acquisition principle: Persons are entitled to property they initially acquired in a just way.
* Rectification principle: Rectify violations of 1 or 2 by restoring property to its rightful owners. ([http://www.missouri.edu/~philrnj/nozick.html Source])

Benkler’s observations and criticisms of the Entitlement Theory
* The theory ignores the poor
* Poverty explained solely as derived from a lack of responsibility
* Highly resistant to claims of redistribution

Ronald Dworkin - [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674008103/qid=1146501395/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-2322222-6539953?v=glance&s=books Sovereign Virtue] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_DworkinRonald Dworkin (wikipedia)]

Dworkin's work combines luck and responsibility in an attempt to alleviate some of the shortcomings (i.e., impossibilities) of Rawls' theory. Dworkin's work does not reject the possibility of redistribution as Nozick's does. Basically, his framework for a just system uses an "auction plus insurance" mechanism to duplicate effect of Rawls' [quite impossible] "Veil of Innocence" using market
* Step 1: Auction. The model starts with an initially equitable distribution of resources (described by Dworkin as an auction in which individuals use the initially distributed resources to bid for resources in the community.)
* Step 2: Insurance. Because people differ in circumstances (i.e., luck), the initial distribution is supplemented with insurance. Everyone pays into a common pool, which is then used to help those with bad luck. ([http://www.distributive-justice.com/theory/dworkin-en.htm Source])

Benkler’s observations and criticisms
* Less attractive from perspective of liberal theories focusing on personal autonomy because it ignores personal responsibility.
* Good for proving a metric of “justness” which can be used to optimize redistribution.
* Too difficult to measure the value of the insured-for issues – wealth, intelligence, health.

 

====Structure====

Structure refers to “causes for the inequality of an individual that are beyond his or her control, but are traceable to institutions, economic organizations, or social relationships that form a society’s transactional framework.

Bruce Ackerman - [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300027575/104-2322222-6539953?v=glance&n=283155 Social Justice in the Liberal State (amazon)] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Justice_in_the_Liberal_StateSocial Justice in the Liberal State (wikipedia)]

Instead of focusing solely on structural causes in inequality, Ackerman proposes reforms that layer structural solutions on top of a model including both responsibility and luck. Ackerman recognizes that one's luck (parental wealth, genetic endowments) combine with one's structurally-limited opportunities (educational opportunities and general transactional framework in one's life) to define a sphere of possibility. Structural reforms, according to Ackerman, must seek to resolve unluckiness-based inequities while still distinguishing between responsible parties to prevent incentivizing irresponsibility.

Ackermans' proposal includes all three of these elements: A government-funded personal endowment at birth that you can save or squander (and “suffer the consequential reduction in welfare.”) The key elements:
* Structure: In combination with establishing a more open transactional framework that would allow anyone to transact with anyone else (another of Ackerman's proposals), this would be a societal institution accessible to all.
* Luck: The funding early in life would not equalize poor children to rich, but it would eliminate many of the worst barriers created by a childhood of poverty.
* Responsibility: The fund may be irresponsibly squandered. This means that the system will not help maintain the wealth of irresponsible parties.

===Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development===
===Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge===
===Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries===
===Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development===

====Software====

====Scientific Publication====

===Commons-Based Research for Food and Medicines===
====Food Security: Commons-Based Agricultural Innovation====
====Access to Medicines: Commons-Based Strategies for Biomedical Research====
===Commons-Based Strategies for Development: Conclusion===

==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
===Other relevant readings===
==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===

====Jamaica Project====

Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is currently involved in a project with prisoners in Jamaica. One its [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/jamaica_project website], the following information is given:

"Led by Berkman Faculty Co-Director Charles Nesson, the Jamaica Project was established in 1998 and has expanded with each successive year through a series of interconnected initiatives. The Project focuses on the problems caused by globalization, exploring the thesis that networks based on communication and exchange of social and intellectual capital can help in rehabilitation of developing countries hurt by globalization."

I had the opportunity to interact with some of the people involved in this project. And will share the information I gained from that session to demonstrate the fact that the internet can have a positive value for social justice.

The program is focused on prisons. According to those involved, the prison situation in Jamaica is less than ideal. There are problems with over-crowding as well as a lack of sanitation. There is huge animosity between the guards and the prisoners. As within any prison system, new social ordering rules are created. Many young men are in prison, often for drug-related crimes. It is difficult for these men to re-enter society and to get jobs, etc.

Why was Jamaica chosen? After all, there are poor prison conditions everywhere. According to Professor Charles Nesson, Jamaica was chosen for it's isolation as an island nation as well as for the fact that, even as a small nation, Jamaica has worldwide recognition. Professor Nesson cites the proliferation of reggae music as one example of this.

The project focuses on helping prisoners by allowing them to gain new skills and do different things for themselves. One early project was a radio station in the prison. This allowed information to be easily transferred between prisoners and outsiders such as their families. The program has also included utilizing computers to learn and create. The program has worked with musician [http://www.jahcure.com Jah Cure] who has been developing music while in prison.

While this project is still in its developing stages, it shows promise for allowing the internet to make a difference in the lives of many of these young men. It has not been able to provide a seamless integration for prisoners back into daily life, but hopes to allow the prisoners to collaborate and start businesses once released.

For additional information please visit the following links:

* [http://www.haa-jamaica.org/ Harvard Jamaica Project]
* [http://www.wayneandwax.org/ Wayne&Wax.org]
* [http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200201.review.clydon.html Christopher Lydon's Parachute Radio]

====Technological Generativity====

[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/zittrain.html Jonathan Zittrain's] paper, [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=847124 The Generative Internet] argues that the ubiquitousness, accessibility, and multi-purpose adaptability of the Internet -- together taken as "generativity" -- are crucial characteristics of today's technical paradigm. Without generativity, computers would become analogous to hard-wired coffee pots capable of only one specific task. Internet would become highly application-specific and not adaptable to new uses. With generativity, on the other hand, "[t]he developed world now finds itself with a wildly generative information technology environment, the result of taking forks in its developmental path that avoided hardware dedicated to predetermined tasks, and that eclipsed network facilities operated by a single umbrella provider responsible both for connectivity and content" ([http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=847124 Zittrain] 17).

Technological generativity is one dimension of Benkler's networked information economy, and one which contributes substantially to the social justice arguments for migrating away from a centralized proprietary market system. Below are generative concepts applied to the liberal theories of justice detailed [http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/9._Justice_and_Development#Liberal_Theories_of_Justice_and_the_Networked_Information_Economy above].

'''Luck''' - Generativity is a concept that contemplates precisely the type of luck that Rawls' theory entails. We cannot say today who will produce the great innovations of tomorrow. It might be the country's biggest ISPs or software producers, or it might be a 13 year old boy. Anyone set to the task of designing the rules of technology behind a "veil of ignorance" -- i.e., not knowing who the innovators will be -- with the goal of maximizing technological progress and subsequent social welfare, will naturally come to a design which keeps open as many doors for innovation as possible. This is generativity.

'''Responsibility''' - In the social welfare context, Nozick and Dworkin both emphasize the importance of building in elements of personal responsibility to a social contract. Without consequences for irresponsible parties, the system would incentivize irresponsibility. According to these theorists, the more responsible one is, the better off one's situation will become. Similar principles apply to technology. If individuals shun the responsibility required of a generative net (security measures, identity protection, etc.), technology creators will have no choice but to migrate to less-generative but more secure platforms.

'''Structure''' - Inequities embedded in social structures limit social justice in ways that overlap with restrictions caused by structurally encoded limitations on the web. Both types of structural limitations may be avoided through systemic design choices. Ackerman suggests that creating "a more open and egalitarian transactional framework . . . would allow anyone access to opportunities to transact with others, rather than depending on, for example, unequal access to social links as a precondition to productive social behavior" ([http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page Benkler] 305). The Internet itself is a perfect example of a transaction-facilitating framework in which people may communicate with each other, regardless of race, class, gender, or any other defining characteristic. The Internet should, according to generativity principles, preserve similar "communication" frameworks on a technological level. The packet routing structure of the Internet allows "smart" devices on the edges of the network to communicate through the "dumb" center of the net. Both types of structural limitations prevent communication and interaction from taking place, both on a social and technical level.

===Counter-examples===

==Key Concepts==

6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media

2007-08-18T10:30:27Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Aq7Mbs, changed back to last version by Ptj

[[Table Of Contents]]

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_6.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 6|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]

==Summary of the chapter==

===Overview===
The concept of public sphere can be narrowed down to the “set of practices members of a society use to communicate about matters they understand to be of public concern and that potentially require collective action or recognition” (177). This chapter argues that as a way to structure these practices, mass media has weaknesses: it offers no return loop from the edges to the core (feedback is local or one-to-one) and relies on a passive consumer culture. The Internet and the emerging networked information economy provide a better public platform.

Communication in the public sphere is structured not only by technical infrastructures, but also by modes of organization, economic models of production, culture (literacy, social egalitarianism, etc.), and institutions (legal frameworks, subsidies). For example, equivalent technical platforms were available in France, the UK and the US a century ago and later in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Yet active public spheres did not always emerge (although repressive regimes may have one, if political opinions spread through networks) and when they did they varied in relative elitism (UK) or populism (US). There was also variation in who supported production hubs, whether it be the state (most countries), advertisers (CNN), combinations of both (BBC, CBC), civil society (party presses in Europe) or nonprofits (the ''Consumer Report'' in the US). These distinctions are helpful because they remind us that Internet access will not determine the new public sphere; human capital and agency as well as collective choices based on culture and institutions may well matter more.

===Design Characteristics of A Communications Platform For a Liberal Public Platform or a Liberal Public Sphere===
There are several basic characteristics of the public sphere necessary, in a wide range of democracies, to communicate private opinion and convert it into public, political opinion and later into formal state action:
*'''Universal intake'''. This does not mean that every voice is heard and every concern debated and answered, but rather that in principle anyone's situation can be considered when someone believes it requires public attention.
*'''Filtering for potential political relevance'''. This is necessary so that the public can focus on important issues.
*'''Filtering for accreditation'''. This ensures that the information communicated is credible.
*'''Synthesis of public opinion'''. What counts as public opinion varies between and among deliberative conceptions and pluralist conceptions of democracy, but some combination of clusters of individual opinion is essential.
*'''Independence from governmental control'''. Though the government can participate in explicit conversations and the administration receives instructions from their output, neither controls the platform itself.

The first and last requirements are the most controversial, for they raise the issue of so-called authoritarian public spheres. Benkler begins this section with Harbermas' descriptive definition of a public sphere and asserts that it can be liberal or authoritarian. The difference is that people in the idealized [[Athenian agora]] or New England town halls express, listen to and evaluate proposals, facts, concerns and opinions with complete freedom, while in authoritarian regimes “communications are regimented and controlled by the government in order to achieve acquiescence and to mobilize support” (181). In both cases at least ''some'' private opinions are communicated and converted into state action.

Yet when Benkler sets out to define the above criteria (182), he only has "a wide range of conceptions of democracy" in mind, not authoritarian regimes where the public sphere may be partially independent and theoretically universal. It thus seems to make little sense to speak of authoritarian public spheres; in fact, regimes that allow a political, public opinion to form and to influence or “convert into” state action are usually considered democratic. But the extent to which they do so is difficult to assess, since sophisticated executives in any regime both listen to public opinion and retain their own agenda (See Case Studies below).

===The Emergence of the Commercial Mass-Media Platform for the Public Sphere===
In seventeenth-century Britain, the dissolution of the Stationers' Monopoly was met by libel prosecutions, high stamp taxes, bribery and the type of government acquisition and censorship
typical in pre-revolutionary France. Overall the press was compliant and distributed to elite audiences. In contrast, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America saw the rise of media competition and weekly circulation as a result of low regulation, high literacy, and prosperity. Local, small-circulation newspapers, however, came under pressure from economies of scale produced by technological innovations (mechanical presses, telegraphs, railways, etc.) and barriers to entry arose: “James Gordon Bennett founded The Herald in 1835 with an investment... equal to a little more than $10,400 in 2005 dollars”; by 1840 the necessary investment was $106,000–$212,000 and by 1850, $2.38 million in 2005 terms (188).

The invention of radio was the only potential inflection point before the Internet. Many countries did adopt a BBC-inspired hybrid model (Canada, Australia, Israel, India) insulated from market and government pressures. But in the US, a combination of technology, business practices and regulatory decisions replicated and expanded the commercial mass-media model, which would also be a template for television. Herbert Hoover did seek some form of nationalization of radio in the name of public interest, but from 1922 on his policies would “systematically benefit large commercial broadcasters” (e.g. the RCA-GE-AT&T-Westinghouse alliance) over small, educational or religious broadcasters and “point-to-point, small-scale wireless telephony and telegraphy” developed by amateurs.

Throughout the twentieth century, mass media was the dominant model of communications in democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. It played a more important role in structuring the public sphere than civic involvement in associations, which led Robert Putnam to identify television as the primary cause of the decline of American civic life.

===Basic Critiques of Mass Media===
Independence from political parties, government and the upper-class as well as professionalism and near-universal visibility have allowed concentrated mass media to express, accredit and filter important issues in the public sphere. That these three functions are combined in the hands of the same few operators, however, has led to three primary critiques.

====Mass Media as a Platform for the Public Sphere====
First, intake is too limited. Few-to-many communication means information loss because there are too few entry points. Concentrated media is also likely to be less representative than distributed media, because reporters are embedded in elite social segments.

This argument about representativeness, however, is not entirely convincing. Media that sells to the masses seems like it would benefit from representing the public as it is, so that viewers can identify with the stories. Also, we can only determine if "distributed media" is more representative when we know something about its distribution - and evidence from 1996-1998 suggests that the Internet reinforces current patterns of political participation, making distributed Internet media (for now) less representative (Norris 1999).

====Media Concentration: The Power of Ownership and Money====
Second, media owners have too much power - to exercise or sell – over public perceptions and public debate. The reason is the lack of competition (concentration in the anti-trust sense) and the majority “mindshare” that a few media firms hold in politically relevant units (concentration in terms of channels to and from an audience). Eli Noam measured this concentration from 1984 to 2001-2002 and found that local media concentration increased except for local television. Yet in 2003 the Sinclair Broadcast Group owned and operated 62 local stations [59 today], deserving roughly ¼ of American households. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group Sinclair] was accused of misinformation and involved in controversies for its 8-station ban of an ABC ''Nightline'' tribute to 721 soldiers killed in Iraq in 2003 and before it ordered its stations to air a documentary criticizing John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism, during prime time just two weeks before the 2004 elections)

====Commercialism, Journalism, and Political Inertness====
Third, advertisement-supported media uses lowest-common-denominator programming. In addition to business interests, it favors majority tastes, titillating or soothing topics, spectacle and entertainment in order to attract large audiences. Celebrities and local crime take precedence over distant famines, while challenging and politically important questions, controversial views, and disturbing images are served to “political junkies” in niche markets (208). Debate is communicated as a performance, that is as “an already presynthesized portrayal of an argument among avatars of relatively large segments of opinion as perceived by the journalists and stagers of the debate” (209). Talk radio and call-in shows are “the pornography and violence of political discourse” (209).

Benkler illustrates this common-denominator problem using Jack Beebe's refinement of “program diversity” analysis, introduced by Peter Steiner in 1952. A
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Hypothetical_channel_distribution.jpg graph] based on a hypothetical channel distribution (Table 6.1) illustrates what Beebe established. According to his model, “media monopolists would show nothing but common-denominator programs” (207) - i.e. when there is only one channel (smallest circle on the graph), all viewers are watching the same sitcom. Competition “begin[s] to serve the smaller preference clusters only if a large enough number of channels” is available – here, more than 250 channels. (The present graph uses a hypothetical total of 3 million viewers to highlight the fact that many are not tuning in during the considered programming slot and that the total number of people expected to watch a category of channels does not decrease as the number of channels increases.)

But since a very large number of channels IS available in the US today, one might ask why high-end programming does not emerge and whether it would on the Internet. Another point which Benkler has difficulty to explain is the "powerful counter-example" of Fox News, which he writes is “likely represents a composite of the Berlusconi effect, the high market segmentation made possible by high-capacity cable systems, the very large market segment of Republicans, and the relatively polarized tone of American political culture since the early 1990s” (208).

==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
*Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
*Peter O. Steiner, “Program Patterns and Preferences, and the Workability of Competition in Radio Broadcasting, ”The Quarterly Journal of Economics 66(1952): 194.
*Jack H.Beebe, “Institutional Structure and Program Choices in Television Markets,”The Quarterly Journal of Economics 91(1977): 15.
*“Names of U.S. Dead Read on Nightline,” AssociatedPress Report, May1, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864247/.

===Other relevant readings===
*Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
*Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media [film]. New York: Zeitgeist Video, 2002. [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4483023443488282779&q=manufacturing+consent+chomsky&pl=true Clip available here].
*Pippa Norris. "Who Surfs?" in Democracy.com: Governance in a Networked world, eds Joseph Nye and Elaine Kamarck (Hollis: Hollis Publishing, 1999). Revised [http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/people/pnorris/acrobat/whosurfs.pdf draft available here].

==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===
*This chapter briefly mentions '''Rupert Murdoch''' (203), a media tycoon whose name is difficult to avoid when discussing the power of concentrated media. The major shareholder, Chairman and Managing Director of one of the world's largest media conglomerates, News Corporation, is regularly accused of favoring his business interests through partisan media coverage. He is also thought to have suppressed the publication of Hong Kong's last British governor's memoir to curry favour with China, to have caused the resignation of a British MP opposed to the war in Iraq (by revealing his homosexual affair), and so on. More at [http://www.outfoxed.org/ Outfoxed.org].

===Counter-examples===
*Although '''Singapore's media environment''' is highly regulated and subject to censorship, the Internet has been used for political and policy debate - even on [http://app.feedback.gov.sg/asp/index.asp official websites]. The public sphere is not independent from government control, and political bloggers are expected to register with the authorities, but ''some'' private opinions influence state action. Benkler might call this a semi-authoritarian public sphere, yet it is unclear whether such a government-controlled platform is a public sphere at all.

==Key Concepts==

3. Peer Production and Sharing

2007-08-18T10:30:00Z

Yochai:

↑ [[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==

A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 1

2007-08-18T10:28:56Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of KmpXir, changed back to last version by Ptj

== Introdução: Um Momento de Oportunidade e Desafios ==

Informação, conhecimento e cultura são centrais para a liberdade e o desenvolvimento humano. A forma como são produzidos e trocados em nossa sociedade afeta criticamente nossa visão do mundo como ele é e como poderia ser; quem decide essas questões; e como nós, como sociedades e governos, vimos a entender o que pode e o que deve ser feito. Durante mais de 150 anos, democracias modernas complexas têm dependido em grande medida de uma economia industrial da informação para estas funções básicas. Nos últimos 15 anos, nós começamos a ver uma mudança radical na organização da produção de informação. Habilitados pela mudança tecnológica, estamos começando a ver uma série de adaptações econômicas, sociais e culturais que tornam possível uma transformação radical na forma como construímos o ambiente informacional que ocupamos como indivíduos autônomos, cidadãos e membros de grupos culturais e sociais. Parece ultrapassado hoje em dia falar da "Revolução da Internet". Em alguns círculos acadêmicos, isto é verdadeiramente ingênuo. Mas não deveria ser. A mudança trazida pelo ambiente da rede de informações é profunda. É estrutural. Ela vai até as bases de como mercados e democracias liberais têm co-evoluído por quase dois séculos.

Diversas mudanças tecnológicas, na organização econômica e nas práticas sociais de produção neste ambiente criaram novas oportunidades para produzirmos e trocarmos informações, conhecimento e cultura. Essas mudanças favoreceram um aumento de produção não-proprietária e fora do sistema de mercado, tanto por indivíduos sozinhos como por esforços cooperativos numa vasta gama de colaborações solta ou fortemente entrelaçadas. Essas práticas emergentes têm apresentado sucesso notável em áreas tão diversas quanto desenvolvimento de ''software'' e jornalismo investigativo, vídeo ''avant-garde'' e jogos ''online'' para múltiplos jogadores. Juntas, elas sugerem a iminência de um novo ambiente de informação em que indivíduos são livres para ter uma participação mais ativa do que era possível na economia industrial de informação do século XX. Essa nova liberdade traz grandes promessas práticas: como uma forma de liberdade individual; como uma plataforma para melhor participação democrática; como um meio de fomentar uma cultura mais crítica e auto-reflexiva; e, numa economia global cada vez mais dependente da informação, um mecanismo para obter melhorias no desenvolvimento humano em todo lugar.

O surgimento de maior espaço para a produção individual e cooperativa de informação e cultura fora do sistema de mercado, porém, ameaça aqueles que já existem na economia industrial de informação. No início do século vinte e um, nos encontramos no meio de uma batalha sobre a ecologia institucional do ambiente digital. Uma vasta gama de leis e instituições – desde amplas áreas como telecomunicações, direito autoral, regulação do comércio internacional, até minúcias como as normas para o registro de nomes de domínios ou se receptores de televisão digital deverão, por lei, reconhecer um código específico – estão sendo interpretadas e desfiguradas em uma tentativa de desnivelar o campo de jogo em favor de um jeito ou de outro de se fazer as coisas. A forma como essas batalhas se desenrolarão na próxima década provavelmente afetarão significantemente a maneira pela qual ficamos sabendo o que acontece no mundo que ocupamos, e em qual a extensão e em que formas nós poderemos – como indivíduos autônomos, cidadãos, e participantes em culturas e comunidades – afetar a forma que nós e outros vêem o mundo como ele é e como poderá ser.

=== Parte Um. A Emersão da Economia de Informação em Rede ===

Hoje as economias mais avançadas do mundo têm feito duas mudanças paralelas que, paradoxalmente, tornam possível a atenuação das limitações que a produção baseada no mercado impõe na busca de valores políticos que são centrais para sociedades liberais. A primeira mudança, que vem ocorrendo por mais de um século, é em direção a uma economia baseada na produção de informação (serviços financeiros, contabilidade, software, ciência) e cultural (filmes, música), e a manipulação de símbolos (desde a fabricação de tênis à sua associação com uma marca e a produção da importância cultural do “[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoosh Swoosh]”). A segunda é a mudança para um ambiente de comunicação construído sobre processadores baratos com altas capacidades computacionais, interconectados em uma rede impregnante - fenômeno que nós associamos à Internet. É essa segunda mudança que permite um papel crescente na produção fora do sistema de mercado nos setores de informação e cultura, organizada em um padrão radicalmente mais descentralizado do que era a verdade desse setor no século vinte. A primeira mudança significa que esses novos padrões de produção – fora do sistema de mercado e radicalmente descentralizados – emergirão, se permitido, no centro, e não na periferia, das mais desenvolvidas economias. Ela promete viabilizar que a produção social e a troca tenham um papel muito maior, juntamente com a propriedade e a produção de mercado, que ela jamais teve nas democracias modernas.

A primeira parte deste livro é dedicada ao estabelecimento de uma série de observações econômicas básicas. O argumento que a cobre é que estamos presenciando a emersão de um novo estágio na economia da informação, que eu chamo de “economia de informação em rede”. Ela está substituindo a economia industrial da informação que caracterizou a produção desde a metade do século dezenove e por todo o século vinte. O que caracteriza a economia de informação em rede é que a ação individual descentralizada – especificamente, nova e importante ação cooperativa e coordenada por meio de mecanismos radicalmente distribuídos e fora do sistema de mercado que não dependem de estratégias proprietárias – tem um papel muito maior do que tinha, ou poderia ter, na economia da informação industrial. O catalisador para essa mudança é o acaso da fabricação da tecnologia computacional, e seu efeito amadurecedor em todas as tecnologias de comunicação e armazenamento. O preço em declínio da computação, comunicação e armazenamento colocaram nas mãos de uma significativa porção da população mundial, na prática, os meios de produção de informação e cultura. O principal diferenciador da produção de comunicação, informação e cultura desde meados do século dezenove era que a efetiva comunicação alcançando a sempre crescentes sociedades e geografias que vieram a compor as unidades relevantes de política e economia da época requeriam um sempre crescente investimento de capital físico. A imprensa física de ampla circulação, o sistema telégrafo, poderosos transmissores de rádio e mais tarde de televisão, cabos e satélites, e o computador “mainframe” se tornaram necessários para produzir informação e comunicá-la em escalas que fossem além do próprio local.

A retirada das amarras físicas na efetiva produção de informação fez a criatividade humana e a economia da própria informação as centrais razões de estruturação na nova economia de informação em rede. Estas têm características bem diferentes do carvão, aço, e trabalho manual, que caracterizaram a economia industrial e estruturaram a base de nossos pensamentos sobre a produção econômica no século passado. Elas levam a três observações sobre o sistema de produção de informações emergente. Primeiro, estratégias não-proprietárias sempre foram mais importantes do que na produção de aço ou automóveis, mesmo quando a economia da comunicação pesou a favor dos modelos industriais. Na medida em que essa barreira material que em última instância conduziu grande parte da produção da informação em direção a estratégias proprietárias e de mercado é removida, essas motivações básicas não proprietárias e fora do sistema de mercado devem, em princípio, se tornar ainda mais importantes para o sistema de produção de informação.

Segundo, na verdade nós presenciamos um grande crescimento na importância da produção fora do sistema de mercado. Indivíduos podem alcançar e informar ou inspirar milhões por todo o mundo. Tal alcance simplesmente não estava disponível para dar um motivação diferente para os indivíduos, que tinham que canalizar seus esforços ou por instituições do mercado ou por ações fundeadas por filantropos ou pelo estado. O fato de todos essas ações estarem disponíveis a todos que estejam ligados à rede, em qualquer lugar, levou ao surgimento de efeitos coordenados, no qual o efeito agregado da ação individual, mesmo quando não é conscientemente cooperativo, produz o efeito coordenado de um novo e rico ambiente de informação. É necessário apenas fazer uma pesquisa no Google em qualquer assunto de seu interesse para ver como a “boa informação”, que é a resposta à pesquisa feita, é produzida pelos efeitos coordenados das ações descoordenadas de uma vasta gama de indivíduos e organizações agindo com um grande leque de motivações – tanto de mercado como fora do sistema de mercado, estatais e não estatais.

Terceiro, e provavelmetne o mais radical, novo, e difícil para observadores perceberem, é o surgimento de esforços por pares em grande escala na produção de informação, conhecimento e cultura. Estes são tipificados pela emersão do software livre e de código aberto. Nós estamos começando a ver a expansão desse modelo não apenas nas nossas plataformas centrais de software, mas além delas dentro de todos os campos de produção de informação e cultura - e esse livro toca estes em muitos campos diferentes - desde a produção por pares de enciclopédias, a notícias e comentários, a entretenimento de imersão.

É fácil não perceber essas mudanças. Elas vão contra as nossas mais básicas intuições de Economia, intuições baseadas em uma economia industrial em uma época em que a única alternativa vista como séria era o Comunismo estatal – uma alternativa considerada quase universalmente ruim hoje. O inegável sucesso econômico do software livre levou alguns economistas de vanguarda a tentar entender porque milhares de desenvolvedores de software frouxamente interligados podem competir com a Microsoft no seu próprio jogo e produzir um enorme sistema operacional – GNU/Linux. Essa crescente literatura, em linha com seus próprios objetivos, tem se focado no software e nas particularidades das comunidades de desenvolvimento de software livre e de código aberto, não obstante a noção de “inovação impulsionada pelo usuário” de Eric von Hippel ter começado a expandir o foco do pensamento sobre como necessidade individual e criatividade impulsionam o desenvolvimento no nível individual, e a sua difusão por meio de redes de indivíduos com a mesma motivação. As implicações políticas do software livre têm sido centrais para o movimento do software livre e seu fundador, Richard Stallman, e foram provocativamente desenvolvidas por Eben Moglen. Software livre é apenas um exemplo proeminente de um fenômeno muito maior. Por que cinqüenta mil voluntários podem, com sucesso, ser co-autores da Wikipedia, a mais séria alternativa on line da Enciclopédia Britânica, e depois entregar a obra de graça? Por que 4.5 milhões de voluntários contribuem com o que sobra do ciclo de computação de seus computadores para criar o mais poderoso supercomputador da Terra, SETI@Home? Sem um modelo analítico amplamente aceito para explicar esses fenômenos, nós tendemos a tratá-los como curiosidades, talvez uma moda passageira, possivelmente significante em um segmento de mercado ou em outro. Ao invés disso nós devemos tentar vê-los pelo que são: um novo modelo de produção emergindo no meio das mais avançadas economias do mundo – essas são as mais integradas em redes de computadores e nas quais produtos e serviços de informação vieram a ocupar os papéis mais valorizados.

Os seres humanos são, e sempre foram, seres motivados de diversas maneiras. Nós agimos instrumentalmente, mas também não instrumentalmente. Nós agimos por ganho material, mas também por bem estar psicológico e gratificação, e por união social. Não há nada de novo ou extraordinário nisso, exceto talvez para alguns economistas. Na economia industrial em geral, e na economia industrial da informação também, a maioria das oportunidades para se fazer coisas que eram valiosas ou importantes para muitas pessoas eram restritas pelo capital físico necessário para que fossem feitas. Do motor a vapor à linha de produção, da imprensa de dupla rotação aos satélites de comunicação, as amarras do capital nas atividades eram tais que a simples vontade de se fazer algo raramente era condição suficiente para habilitar alguém a fazê-lo. Financiar o capital físico, por sua vez, necessariamente orientava projetos que necessitavam de muito capital na direção de estratégias de produção e organização que justificassem esse investimento. Em economias de mercado isso significava orientar na direção da produção de mercado. Em economias geridas pelo estado, isso significava orientar a produção na direção dos objetivos da burocracia estatal. Em qualquer caso, a liberdade individual prática de cooperar com outros na elaboração de coisas de valor era limitada pela extensão dos requerimentos de capital da produção.

Na economia de informação em rede, o capital físico necessário para a produção é amplamente distribuído pela sociedade. Computadores pessoais e conexões de rede são ubíquos. Isso não significa que eles não possam ser usados por mercados, ou que indivíduos deixem de buscar oportunidades de mercado. Isso significa, porém, que sempre que alguém, em qualquer lugar, dentre os bilhões de seres humanos conectados, e em última instância dentre todos os que estarão conectados, queria fazer alguma coisa que requeira criatividade humana, um computador e uma conexão de rede, ele ou ela poderá fazê-lo sozinho, ou em cooperação com outros. Ele ou ela já tem a capacidade de capital necessário para tanto; se não sozinho, então pelo menos em cooperação com outros indivíduos agindo por razões complementares. O resultado é que significantemente mais daquilo que os seres humanos dão valor pode ser feito por indivíduos, que interagem uns com os outros socialmente, como seres humanos e como seres sociais, ao invés de como agentes de mercado por um sistema de preços. Algumas vezes, em situações que especificarei com mais detalhes, essas colaborações fora do sistema de mercado podem ser melhores no esforço motivacional e podem permitir pessoas criativas trabalharem em projetos de informação mais eficientemente que os mecanismos tradicionais corporativos e de mercado. O resultado é um setor florescente de produção de informação, conhecimento e cultura fora do sistema de mercado, baseado no ambiente de rede, e aplicado a qualquer coisa que muitos indivíduos conectados podem imaginar. Seus resultados, por sua vez, não são tratados como propriedade exclusiva. Eles são, ao contrário, objeto de uma crescentemente robusta ética de compartilhamento aberto, aberto para que todos os demais construam a partir deles, estendam, e façam o deles próprio.

Porque a presença e importância de produção fora do sistema de mercado se tornam tão contra-intuitivas para pessoas vivendo em economias de mercado no fim do século vinte, a parte I deste volume é razoavelmente detalhada e técnica; pois superar o que nós intuitivamente “sabemos” requer uma análise disciplinada. Leitores não inclinados a análises econômicas devem pelo menos ler a introdução à parte I, os segmentos intitulados “Quando a Produção de Informação Encontra o Comutador” e “Diversidade de Estratégias no nosso Atual Sistema de Produção” no capítulo 2, e os casos de estudo no capítulo 3. Estes devem dar uma idéia suficiente do que eu quero dizer por diversidade de estratégias de produção para informação e a emersão da produção individual e cooperativa fora do sistema de mercado, que serve de base para as partes mais orientadas às normas deste livro. Leitores que são genuinamente céticos quanto à possibilidade de a produção fora do sistema de mercado ser sustentável e efetiva, e em muitos casos é uma estratégia eficiente de produção de informação, conhecimento e cultura, devem dedicar tempo à leitura da parte I integralmente. A emersão precisamente dessa possibilidade e prática resta no coração de minhas alegações sobre a forma como compromissos liberais são traduzidos em experiências vividas no ambiente de rede, e forma a fundação fática da discussão político-teórica e jurídico-institucional de que se ocupa o restante desse livro.

=== Economia de Informação em Rede e Sociedade Liberais Democráticas ===

Como nós fazemos informação, como nós a obtemos, como nos dirigimos aos demais, e os demais se dirigem a nós são componentes centrais que formam a liberdade em qualquer sociedade. A Parte II deste livro dá uma visão detalhada de como as mudanças de custo tecnológicas, econômicas e sociais do ambiente de informação em rede afetam uma série de compromissos centrais de uma vasta gama de democracias liberais. Basicamente a alegação é de que a diversidade de meios de organizar a produção e uso de informação abre uma gama de possibilidades para buscar valores políticos centrais em sociedades liberais – liberdade individual, um sistema político mais genuinamente participatório, uma cultura crítica, e justiça social. Estes valores dão vetores de moralidade política no curso dos quais a forma e dimensões de qualquer sociedade liberal podem ser tramadas. Tendo em vista que as implicações de suas políticas práticas geralmente são contraditórias, ao invés de complementares, a busca de cada um impõe certos limites na forma como buscamos os outros, levando diferentes sociedades liberais a respeitá-las de diferentes maneiras. O quanto uma sociedade limita os poderes decisórios da maioria em favor da liberdade individual, ou o quanto ela busca justiça social, sempre foram atributos que definem os contornos políticos e natureza daquela sociedade. Mas os fatores econômicos da produção industrial, e a busca de produtividade e crescimento, impuseram um limite na forma em que podemos buscar uma combinação de arranjos para implementar nosso compromisso com a liberdade e a justiça. Singapura é geralmente exposta como um exemplo extremo da troca entre liberdade por bem-estar, mas todas as democracias com economias capitalistas avançadas fizeram em parte tal troca. Previsões de quão bem seremos capazes de nos alimentar serão sempre uma importante consideração ao se pensar, por exemplo, a democratização da produção de trigo, ou fazê-la mais igualitária. Esforços para avançar democracia no local de trabalho frequentemente afundam nas águas rasas – reais ou imaginadas – desses limites, da mesma forma que diversos planos para redistribuição em nome da justiça social. A produção de mercado e proprietária geralmente parece produtiva demais para que se mexa nela. A emersão da economia de informação em rede promete expandir os horizontes da imaginação política viável. As diferentes formas de governo podem buscar diferentes combinações de respeito por diferentes compromissos liberais. No entanto, o abrangente limite representado pela percepção de necessidade do modelo industrial de produção de informação e cultura mudou significantemente como uma limitação efetiva na busca de compromissos liberais.

==== Autonomia Ampliada ====

A economia de informação em rede melhora a capacidade prática de indivíduos em três dimensões: (1) ela melhora a capacidade dos indivíduos de fazer mais para e por eles próprios; (2) ela aumenta a sua capacidade de fazer mais comunalmente com outros, sem ser limitado a organizar a sua relação por um sistema de preços ou por sistemas tradicionais hierárquicos tradicionais de organizações sociais e econômicas; e (3) ela melhora a capacidade de indivíduos fazerem mais em organizações formais que operam fora da esfera do mercado. Essa autonomia ampliada está no centro de todas as outras melhorias que eu descrevo. Indivíduos estão usando a sua recém expandida liberdade prática para agir e cooperar com outros em formas que melhoram a experiência praticada da democracia, justiça e desenvolvimento, uma cultura crítica e comunidade.
Eu começo, portanto, com uma análise econômica da autonomia individual. Primeiro, indivíduos podem fazer mais por eles próprios independentemente da autorização ou cooperação de outros. Eles podem criar as suas próprias expressões, assim como buscar a informação que precisam, com substancialmente menos dependência da mídia de massa do século vinte. Segundo, e não menos importante, indivíduos podem fazer mais em uma afiliação frouxa com outros, ao invés de precisar de relações estáveis e duradouras, como relações entre colegas de trabalho, ou participação em organizações formais, para concretizar uma cooperação efetiva. Muitos poucos indivíduos vivendo na economia industrial de informação poderiam, em qualquer senso realista, decidir construir a nova Biblioteca de Alexandria de alcance global, ou de criar uma enciclopédia. Na medida em que a colaboração entre indivíduos distantes entre si se torna mais comum, a idéia de se fazer coisas que requerem colaboração com outros se torna muito mais alcançável, e a gama de projetos que indivíduos podem escolher como deles próprios aumenta qualitativamente. A própria fluidez e pouco compromisso requerido em qualquer relação cooperativa aumenta a gama e diversidade de cooperação nas quais as pessoas podem entrar, e, portanto, de projetos colaborativos que eles podem imaginar como abertos para eles.
Estas formas nas quais autonomia é aumentada requerem uma concepção consideravelmente rica de autonomia como uma experiência prática vivida, ao invés de uma concepção formal preferida por muitos que pensam a autonomia como um conceito filosófico. Mas mesmo de uma perspectiva mais estreita, a qual cobre concepções mais amplas de autonomia, no mínimo podemos dizer que os indivíduos são menos suscetíveis a manipulação por uma classe de outros legalmente definida – os proprietários das infra-estruturas de comunicações e mídia. A economia de informação em rede dá uma variedade de plataformas alternativas para comunicação, de tal forma que ela modera o poder do modelo de mídia de massa tradicional, onde propriedade dos meios de comunicação possibilita um proprietário a selecionar o que os outros vêem, e assim afetar as suas percepções do que eles podem e não podem fazer. Mais ainda, a diversidade de perspectivas na forma como o mundo é e como ele poderia ser para qualquer indivíduo é qualitativamente aumentada. Isso dá a indivíduos um papel significantemente maior na autoria de suas próprias vidas, ao possibilitá-los de perceber uma maior gama de possibilidades, e de dá-los uma base mais rica contra a qual medirão as escolhas que eles fazem de fato.

==== Democracia: A Esfera Pública Interligada ====

A segunda importante conseqüência da economia de informação em rede é que permite a mudança de uma esfera pública de veiculação de mídia em massa para uma esfera pública interligada. Essa mudança é também baseada na crescente liberdade desfrutada pelos indivíduos na criação de informação e conhecimento, e as possibilidades que ela apresenta para uma nova esfera pública emergir ao lado do mercado da mídia de massa comercial. A idéia de que a Internet democratiza não é nova. Tem sido um dos principais temas da literatura sobre a Internet desde o início dos anos noventa. A primeira geração de argumentos, relativamente simples, sobre os efeitos libertadores da Internet, resumidos na celebração da Suprema Corte dos Estados Unidos de seu potencial de fazer de todos panfletistas, veio sob uma variedade de críticas e ataques no curso da última meia década. Aqui, eu ofereço uma análise detalhada de como a emersão de uma economia de informação em rede em particular, como uma alternativa para a mídia de massa, melhora a esfera política pública. A primeira geração de críticas ao efeito democratizante da Internet era baseada em várias conseqüências do problema de excesso de informação, ou a objeção de Babel. De acordo com a objeção de Babel, quando todos podem falar, ninguém consegue ouvir, e nós regressamos a uma cacofonia ou à re-emersão do dinheiro como o fator distintivo entre declarações que são ouvidas e aquelas que chafurdam na obscuridade. A segunda geração de críticas era de que a Internet não é descentralizada como acreditávamos nos anos noventa. O padrão de uso da Internet mostra que poucos sítios capturam uma um volume absurdamente grande de atenção e milhões de sítios passam despercebidos. Neste mundo, a objeção de Babel é talvez evitada, mas às custas da promessa da Internet como um meio democrático.

Nos capítulos 6 e 7, eu ofereço uma análise detalhada e atualizada disso, talvez o melhor e mais combativo argumento sobre os efeitos liberalizantes da Internet. Primeiro, é importante entender que quaisquer considerações sobre os efeitos democratizantes da Internet devem medir seus efeitos em comparação com a esfera pública baseada em mídias de massa e comercial e não comparada com uma utopia idealizada que nós adotamos uma década atrás de como a Internet poderia ser. As mídias de massa comercial que dominaram as esferas públicas de todas as democracias modernas foram extensivamente estudadas. Elas foram mostradas em literatura extensiva exibindo uma série de falhas destas como plataforma para o discurso público. Primeiro, elas propiciam uma bacia relativamente pequena para receber opiniões – ou seja, observações e preocupações de pessoas demais em sociedades complexas modernas ficam despercebidas e não atendidas pelo pequeno grupo de jornalistas comerciais encarregados de perceber o alcance de temas de interesse público em uma dada sociedade. Segundo, particularmente onde o mercado é concentrado, elas dão aos seus proprietários poder excessivo para dar forma à opinião e à informação. Eles podem usar esse poder eles próprios, ou vendê-lo para o maior lance. E terceiro, toda vez que os donos das mídias comerciais escolhem por não exercer o seu poder dessa forma, eles então tendem a programar em direção ao vazio e calmante, ao invés de em direção ao que seja engajante politicamente, e eles tendem a simplificar em exagero discussões públicas complexas. Na formação dessas limitações da mídia de massa, eu sugiro que uma esfera pública interligada possibilita muito mais indivíduos comunicarem suas observações e pontos de vista a muitos outros, e fazê-lo de modo que não pode ser controlado pelos donos da mídia e não é facilmente corrompido pelo dinheiro assim como a mídia de massa.

A literatura empírica e teórica sobre a topologia e uso de rede dá resposta a todas as principais críticas ao argumento de que a Internet melhora a estrutura da esfera pública. Em particular eu mostro como uma vasta gama de mecanismos – começando de uma simples lista de postagem, passando por sítios de Rede estáticos, a emersão de capacidades de escrita na Rede, e mobilidade – está sendo misturada em um sistema social para a coleção de informação política, observações e comentários salientes, e provendo uma plataforma para discurso. Essas plataformas solvem uma das principais limitações da mídia de massa comercial e concentrada como a principal plataforma da esfera pública em democracias contemporâneas complexas. Elas possibilitam qualquer um, em qualquer lugar, observando o ambiente social por novos olhos – os olhos de alguém que pode injetar um pensamento, uma crítica, ou a preocupação no debate público. Indivíduos se tornam menos passivos, e assim observadores mais engajados de espaços sociais que podem potencialmente se tornar assuntos para conversa política; eles se tornam participantes mais engajados nos debates sobre as suas observações. Os vários formatos da esfera pública interligada dão a qualquer um um canal para falar, inquirir, investigar, sem a necessidade de acessar os recursos de uma organização de mídia de massa. Estamos vendo a emersão de métodos novos e descentralizados para o preenchimento da função de vigia e para o engajamento em debate e organização política. Estes estão sendo realizados em uma forma distintivamente fora do sistema de mercado, em modos que teriam sido muito mais difíceis de buscar efetivamente, como uma parte comum na construção da esfera pública, antes do ambiente de informação em rede. Trabalhando através de exemplos detalhados, eu tento dar ao otimismo acerca das vantagens democráticas na esfera pública interligada um argumento completamente especificado.

A esfera pública interligada também começou a responder ao problema de excesso de informação, mas sem recriar o poder da media de massa nos pontos de filtragem e credenciamento. Existem dois elementos centrais para esses acontecimentos: Primeiro, nos estamos começando a ver a emersão de fontes alternativas e fora do sistema de mercado, produzida entre pares para a filtragem e credenciamento ao invés de alternativas de mercado. Relevância e credenciamento são, em si próprias, bens de informação, tal como um software ou uma enciclopédia. O que nós estamos vendo na rede é que filtrar tanto por relevância quanto por credenciamento se tornou o objeto de muitas práticas de apontamento mútuo, revisão entre pares, de apontamento para fontes originais de argumentos, e sua complementação, a prática social de que aqueles que têm alguma habilidade para avaliar os argumentos de fato os comentam. O segundo elemento é uma observação contingente mas empiricamente confirmada de como os usuários em verdade usam a rede. Do ponto de vista descritivo, o curso da informação pela rede é muito mais ordenado do que uma caminhada aleatória na cacofonia do fluxo de informação poderia sugerir, e significantemente menos centralizado que o ambiente de mídia de massa. Alguns sites são muito mais visíveis e lidos que outros. Isto é verdade tanto quando alguém vê a Rede como um todo, como quando alguém vê pequenas concentrações de sítios similares ou usuários que tendem a se agrupar. A maior parte dos comentaristas que olharam para este padrão interpretou-no como a re-emersão da mídia de massa – o domínio dos poucos sites visíveis. Mas uma consideração completa dos vários elementos da literatura da topologia da rede sustenta uma interpretação muito diferente, na qual a ordem emerge no ambiente de rede sem recriar as falhas da esfera pública dominada pela mídia de massa. Sítios se concentram em volta de comunidades de interesse: Brigadas de incêndio australianas tendem a se ligar a outras brigadas de incêndio australianas, blogs (Web logs ou diários on line) políticos conservadores nos Estados Unidos a outros blogs políticos conservadores nos Estados Unidos. Em cada uma dessas concentrações, o padrão de alguns nódulos de alta visibilidade continua, mas conforme as concentrações e tornam pequenas o suficiente, muito mais sítios são moderadamente ligados uns aos outros na concentração. Através desse padrão, a rede parece estar se formando em uma coluna dorsal de atenção. Concentrações “locais” – comunidades de interesse – podem prover veto inicial e qualidades como a de revisão entre pares para contribuições individuais feitas dentro da concentração de interesse. Observações que sejam vistas como significantes dentro de uma comunidade de interesse chegam a sítios relativamente visíveis naquela concentração, de onde elas se tornam visíveis para pessoas em concentrações maiores (“regionais”). Isso continua até que uma observação percorre o caminho até sítios “super-estrelas” que centenas de milhares de pessoas podem ler e usar. Esse caminho é complementado pela prática relativamente fácil de comentários e mensagens diretamente aos sítios super-estrelas, a qual cria um atalho para uma atenção mais ampla. É razoavelmente simples de captar intuitivamente porque esses padrões podem emergir. Usuários tendem a tratar as escolhas de elos (links) de outras pessoas como indicativos do que vale a pena ler para elas. Elas não são escravizadas por isso. Não obstante; elas aplicam julgamento próprio se certos tipos de usuários – digamos, políticos inveterados de uma estirpe específica, ou fãs de um programa televisivo específico – são os melhores visionários do que será interessante para elas. O resultado é que a atenção no ambiente interligado depende mais de ser interessante a um grupo engajado do que é no ambiente da mídia de massa, onde interesse moderado de um grande número de espectadores pouco engajados é preferível. Por conta da redundância das concentrações e elos, e porque muitas concentrações são baseadas em interesse mútuo e não em investimento capital, é mais difícil comprar a atenção na Internet do que nos canais de mídia de massa, e mais difícil ainda para esmagar um ponto de vista contrário. Essas características salvam o ambiente em rede da objeção de Babel sem re-introduzir poder excessivo a uma única parte ou pequena concentração delas, e sem causar ressurgência do papel do dinheiro como uma pré-condição à habilidade para falar publicamente.

==== Justiça e Desenvolvimento Humano ====

Informação, conhecimento, e bens ricos em informação e ferramentas têm um papel significante na oportunidade econômica e no desenvolvimento humano. Apesar de a economia de informação em rede não poder resolver a fome e as doenças no mundo, a sua emergência abre avenidas razoavelmente bem definidas para se abordar e construir os requisitos básicos de justiça e desenvolvimento humano. Porque os produtos da economia de informação em rede geralmente são não-proprietários, ela dá acesso livre a um conjunto de instrumentalidades básicas de oportunidade econômica e de produtos básicos da economia de informação em rede. De uma perspectiva liberal preocupada com a justiça, no mínimo, esses produtos se tornam mais e mais facilmente acessíveis como “bens terminados” àqueles que são menos privilegiados. Mais importante, a disponibilidade de recursos de informação gratuitamente faz com que participar da economia dependa menos de transpor barreiras de acesso a financiamento e a redes sócio-transacionais que faziam sair da pobreza difícil em economias industriais. Esses recursos e ferramentas consequentemente melhoram a qualidade da oportunidade.

De uma perspectiva mais global focada no desenvolvimento humano, a liberdade de usar recursos e qualidades básicos permite uma participação melhorada na produção de informação e de componentes dependentes de informação do desenvolvimento humano. Primeiro, e atualmente mais desenvolvido, a emersão de uma grande gama de aplicativos de softwares livres torna mais fácil para países pobres e de média renda obterem capacidades fundamentais em software. Mais importante, o software livre permite a emersão de capacidades locais para prover serviços para softwares, tanto para uso nacional como para base de participação em uma indústria mundial de serviços para software, sem a necessidade de depender de permissão de empresas multinacionais de software. Publicações científicas estão começando a usar estratégias comunitárias para publicar fontes importantes de informação de forma a fazer os produtos disponíveis gratuitamente em países mais pobres. Mais ambiciosamente, nós começamos a ver, em pesquisas agriculturais, esforços públicos, sem fins lucrativos e do tipo “código aberto” combinados, sendo desenvolvidos e aplicados para problemas de inovação agricultural. O objetivo final é desenvolver um conjunto de capacidades básicas que permitiriam a colaboração entre fazendeiros e cientistas, tanto em países pobres como em volta do mundo, a desenvolver colheitas melhores e mais nutritivas, para melhorar a segurança alimentar através das regiões mais pobres do mundo. Igualmente ambiciosa, mas menos desenvolvida operacionalmente, nós estamos começando a ver recentes esforços para traduzir este sistema de inovação para produtos de saúde.

Todos esses esforços são voltados para a solução de um dos problemas mais cintilantes da pobreza, a do fraco desenvolvimento humano: Mesmo com o crescimento da opulência em economias mais abastadas – já que a informação e a inovação oferecem vidas mais longas e saudáveis que são enriquecidas por melhor acesso a informação, conhecimento, e cultura – em muitos lugares, a expectativa de vida está caindo, a mortalidade está crescendo, e o analfabetismo permanece desenfreado. Parte, mas de maneira nenhuma toda, dessa injustiça global se deve ao fato de que nós nos tornamos dependentes de um modelo de negócio proprietário, cada vez mais exclusivo, para prover alguns dos componentes informativos mais básicos do desenvolvimento humano. Na medida em que a economia da informação em rede cria novas maneiras de produzir informação, cujos produtos não são tratados como proprietários e exclusivos, mas podem ser disponibilizados gratuitamente a todos, ela oferece oportunidades modestas mas importantes para melhorar o desenvolvimento humano em todos os lugares. Nós estamos vendo os primeiros sinais da emersão de um eco sistema de inovação feito de financiamento público, “sem fins lucrativos” tradicionais, e o recém emergente setor de produção entre pares que está tornando possível avançar o desenvolvimento humano por meio de esforços cooperativos tanto em países ricos como em pobres.

==== Uma Cultura Crítica e Relações Sociais Interligadas ====

A economia da informação em rede também permite a emersão de uma cultura mais crítica e auto-reflexiva. Na década passada, alguns estudiosos de Direito – Niva Elkin Koren, Terry Fisher, Larry Lessig e Jack Balkin – começaram a examinar como a Internet democratiza a cultura. Seguindo esse trabalho, e fundado na fibra deliberativa da teoria democrática, eu sugiro que o ambiente de informação em rede nos oferece um sistema mais atrativo de produção cultural em duas maneiras diferentes (1) ele faz a cultura mais transparente; e (2) ele faz a cultura mais maleável. Juntos, estes significam que estamos presenciando o surgimento de uma nova cultura folclórica - uma prática que tem sido amplamente suprimida na era industrial de produção cultural – onde muitos mais de nós participam ativamente na produção de atos culturais e na descoberta de significado para o mundo à nossa volta. Essas práticas fazem de seus praticantes melhores “leitores” de sua própria cultura e mais auto-reflexivos e críticos da cultura que ocupam, consequentemente capacitando-os a tornarem-se participantes mais auto-reflexivos em conversas dentro daquela cultura. Isto também dá liberdade muito maior a indivíduos para participarem na criação cultural de outros, tomando “posse” delas, como diz Balkin, e fazendo a cultura que eles ocupam mais deles próprios do que era possível com cultura de mídia de massa. Nesse sentido podemos dizer que a cultura está se tornando mais democrática: auto-refletiva e participativa.

Por grande parte deste livro, eu friso as capacidades aumentadas de indivíduos como a principal força motora por trás da economia em rede da informação. Essa capacidade individual aumentada fez surgir preocupações em muitos de que a Internet aumenta a fragmentação da comunidade, continuando a longa tendência da industrialização. Um volume substancial de literatura sugere, porém, que estamos na verdade usando a Internet em detrimento da televisão, e que essa troca é boa do ponto de vista de laços sociais. Nós usamos a Internet para mantermos contato com a família e amigos próximos, tanto os geograficamente como os longe. Considerando que nós vemos uma mudança nas relações sociais, é porque, além de reforçar nossas ligações íntimas, nós estamos aumentando o alcance e a variedade das conexões menos íntimas. Seguindo Manuel Castells e Barry Wellman, eu sugiro que nós nos tornamos adeptos em preencher algumas das mesmas funções que tradicionalmente foram associadas com a importância de uma comunidade com uma rede de conexões sociais interseccionadas que são limitadas em duração e intensidade.

=== Quatro Comentários Metodológicos ===

Há quatro escolhas metodológicas representadas por esta tese que eu delineei até aqui, e, portanto, neste livro como um todo, que requerem explicação. A primeira é que eu atribuo um papel muito relevante para a tecnologia. A segunda é que eu ofereço uma explicação centrada em relações sociais, mas operando no domínio da economia, ao invés da sociologia. A terceira e a quarta são mais relacionadas à teoria política liberal. A terceira é que eu estou oferecendo uma teoria política liberal, mas seguindo um caminho que geralmente tem sido resistido nessa literatura – considerando a estrutura econômica e os limites do mercado e as instituições que o suportam de uma perspectiva da liberdade, ao invés de aceitar que o mercado é o que ele é, e defendendo ou criticando ajustes através das lentes da justiça distributiva. Quarta, meu enfoque enfatiza muito ações individuais em relações fora do sistema de mercado. Muito da discussão gira em torno da escolha entre comportamento social de mercado e fora do sistema de mercado. Em grande parte o estado não tem nenhuma participação, ou é entendido como atuando primariamente de forma negativa, de certa forma isso não ocorre nas correntes do pensamento político liberal. Neste ponto, essa tese parece mais libertária ou anárquica do que liberal. Eu não desconsidero totalmente o estado, como eu vou explicar. Mas eu alego que o que é especial neste momento é a crescente eficácia de indivíduos e afiliações frouxas e fora do sistema de mercado como agentes de política econômica. Assim como o mercado, o estado terá que se adaptar a essa nova modalidade emergente de ação humana. Teoria política liberal tem que reconhecer e entender isso antes que possa começar a renegociar a sua ordem do dia para o estado liberal, progressista ou não.

==== O Papel da Tecnologia em Assuntos Humanos ====

A primeira escolha metodológica se refere a como se deve tratar o papel da tecnologia no desenvolvimento de assuntos humanos. Este tipo de determinismo tecnológico que tipificou Lewis Mumford, ou, especificamente na área de comunicações Marshall McLuhan, é amplamente vista no meio acadêmico como determinista demais, apesar de talvez nem tanto na cultura popular. O esforço contemporâneo de oferecer uma explicação com mais nuances, baseadas em instituições, e escolhas baseadas em políticas sejam talvez melhor representadas pelo excelente trabalho recentemente lançado por Paul Starr. Apesar de esses esforços contemporâneos serem realmente poderosos, não se pode confundir um trabalho como o de Elizabeth Eisenstein, cuidadosamente argumentado e detalhado, ''A Imprensa Escrita como um Agente de Mudança'', com o determinismo de McLuhan. Considerar que tecnologias são apenas ferramentas que acontecem, mais ou menos, de estar lá, e são empregadas em qualquer sociedade, em um padrão que depende apenas do que a sociedade e cultura fazem dela é muito limitado. Uma sociedade que não tem roda e não tem escrita tem limites no que ela pode fazer. Barry Wellman importou para a sociologia um temo emprestado da engenharia - capacidade ([http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Lista_de_termos "affordance"])/1. Langdon Winner os chamou de “propriedades políticas” das tecnologias/2. Uma versão anterior desta idéia é o conceito de “parcialidade das comunicações” de Harold Innis/3. Em debates de Política e Direito da Internet esse enfoque se tornou amplamente adotado pelo trabalho influente de Lawrence Lessig que o caracterizou como “código é lei”/4.

A idéia é de fácil explicação, e se distingue de um determinismo ingênuo. Tecnologias diferentes fazem diferentes tipos de ação e interação humana mais fácil ou mais difícil de se concretizarem. Mantendo-se todas as outras variáveis iguais, as coisas que são mais fáceis de serem feitas têm mais chances de serem feitas, e as coisas que são mais difíceis têm menos chances. As outras variáveis nunca são iguais. Por essa razão determinismo tecnológico ''strcito sensu'' - se há a tecnologia “t”, deve se esperar que a estrutura ou relação social “s” surja – é falso. Navegação oceânica teve uma adoção e uso diferentes quando introduzidos em estados cujas ambições territoriais imperiais foram eficientemente contrariadas por fortes vizinhos – como Espanha e Portugal – do que em nações que estavam focadas em construir um vasto império continental, como a China. A impressão em papel teve efeitos diferentes na alfabetização em países onde a religião encorajava a leitura individual – como a Prússia, Escócia, Inglaterra e Nova Inglaterra – do que onde a religião desencorajava interação individual e não intermediada com textos, como França e Espanha. Esta forma de entender o papel da tecnologia é adotada aqui. Nem determinista nem totalmente maleável, a tecnologia estabelece alguns parâmetros de ação social. Ela pode tornar algumas ações, relações, organizações e instituições mais fáceis de serem realizadas, e outras mais difíceis. Em um ambiente desafiador – sejam os desafios naturais ou humanos – ela pode fazer alguns comportamentos se tornarem obsoletos ao aumentar a eficácia de estratégias que competem diretamente com estes. No entanto, dentro do terreno do que é viável – usos não se tornam impossíveis pela adoção ou rejeição de uma tecnologia – diferentes padrões de adoção e uso podem resultar em relações sociais muito diferentes que emergem ao redor da tecnologia. A menos que esses padrões estejam em competição, ou a menos que mesmo em competição eles não sejam catastroficamente menos eficientes em conquistar esses desafios, diferentes sociedades podem persistir com diferentes padrões através de longos períodos. É a viabilidade da sustentabilidade em longo prazo de diferentes padrões de uso que fazem esse livro relevante para política, não apenas para a teoria. As mesmas tecnologias de computadores em rede podem ser adotadas em padrões muito diferentes. Não há garantia de que a tecnologia da informação em rede levará a melhorias em inovação, liberdade e justiça que eu sugiro serem possíveis. Essa é uma escolha que nós enfrentamos como sociedade. A forma como desenvolvemos irá, em grande medida, depender das escolhas que fizermos na próxima década ou mais.

==== Os Papéis da Análise Econômica e do Individualismo Metodológico ====

Deve se enfatizar, como o segundo ponto, que este livro tem um metodologia descritiva que é distintivamente individualista e econômica em sua orientação, o que dificilmente é a única forma de se abordar este problema. O tratamento magisterial da sociedade em rede feito por Manuel Castell/5 coloca a sua característica principal na mudança de grupos e hierarquias para redes como modelos sociais e organizacionais – organização de assuntos humanos de forma mais frouxa e flexível. Castell desenvolve sua teoria conforme ele descreve uma vasta gama de mudanças, de redes de transporte à globalização e industrialização. Em seu trabalho, a Internet se encaixa neste movimento, tornando possível uma melhor coordenação e cooperação dessas redes relacionadas frouxamente. A minha ênfase é nos papéis relativos de setores dentro e fora do sistema de mercado, e como essa mudança ancora a radical descentralização que ele também observa, como objeto de observação sociológica. Eu coloco no centro da mudança as características técnicas e econômicas de redes de computadores e informação. Estas provêem o pivô para a mudança em direção à descentralização radical da produção. Elas são a base da mudança de um ambiente de informação dominado por ações proprietárias e orientadas para o sistema de mercado, para um mundo onde ambientes negociais não proprietários e fora do sistema de mercado têm um grande papel lado a lado com a produção de mercado. Este recém emerso setor não proprietário afeta em grau substancial todo o ambiente de informação nos quais indivíduos e sociedades levam suas vidas. Se há uma lição que podemos aprender com a globalização e o sempre crescente alcance do mercado, é que a lógica do mercado exerce enorme pressão sobre estruturas sociais existentes. Se estivermos de fato vendo a emersão de um componente substancial de produção fora do sistema de mercado no próprio centro de nosso motor econômico – a produção e troca de informação, e através dela de bens, ferramentas, serviços e funcionalidades baseados em informações – então essa mudança sugere um verdadeiro limite da extensão do mercado. Este limite, crescendo dentro do próprio mercado o qual ele delimita, nos seus locais mais avançados, representaria uma mudança genuína na direção do que parecia ser um sempre crescente alcance da economia e sociedade de mercado no último meio século.

==== A Estrutura Econômica na Teoria Política Liberal ====

O terceiro ponto relaciona-se com o papel da estrutura econômica na teoria política liberal. Minha análise neste âmbito é prática e humanamente centrada. Com isso eu quero dizer duas coisas: Primeiro, eu me preocupo com seres humanos, com indivíduos como sustentáculos de ambições morais em relação à estrutura política e econômica de sistemas nos quais eles vivem. Na tradição liberal, a posição que eu assumo é humanística e geral, em oposição à política e específica. Ela se preocupa primeira e fundamentalmente com declarações de seres humanos como seres humanos, ao invés dos requisitos para a democracia ou direitos de cidadania ou filiação em uma comunidade autogovernada de forma legitima ou relevante. Há diversas formas de se respeitar direitos básicos de liberdade, dignidade, e bem estar humanos. Diferentes regimes liberais o fazem com diferentes combinações de práticas constitucionais e políticas. O crescimento de estruturas e relações de informação globais afeta seres humanos em todos os lugares. Em alguns lugares, complementam a tradição democrática. Em outros, desestabilizam as limitações às liberdades. Um entendimento de como podemos pensar neste momento em termos de liberdade e desenvolvimento humano deve transcender as tradições específicas, liberais e não-liberais, de qualquer nação específica. A efetiva prática de liberdade que vemos emergir do ambiente em rede permite pessoas alcançarem além das fronteiras nacionais ou sociais, através das divisões de espaço e política. Ela permite que as pessoas solucionem conjuntamente problemas em novas associações fora das fronteiras de associação formal e político-legal. Neste fluído ambiente social econômico, os pleitos individuais provêem uma âncora moral para considerar as estruturas de poder e oportunidade, de liberdade e bem-estar. Ademais, apesar de ser frequentemente conveniente, e amplamente aceito tratar organizações ou comunidades como entidades jurídicas, como “pessoas”, elas não são agentes morais. O seu papel em uma análise de liberdade e justiça é decorrente de seu papel – tanto como facilitadoras quanto como limitadoras – como contexto estrutural no qual seres humanos, os reais agentes morais da política econômica, se encontram. A este respeito, minhas posições aqui são decididamente “liberais”, em oposição a comunitárias ou críticas.

Segundo, eu me preocupo com seres humanos verdadeiros em ambientes históricos verdadeiros, não com representação de seres humanos abstraídas de seu ambiente. Esses compromissos significam que liberdade e justiça para indivíduos situados historicamente são medidos de uma perspectiva em primeira pessoa e prática. Nenhum limite na liberdade individual e nenhuma fonte de iniqüidade são categoricamente isentos de revisão, tampouco são consideradas privilegiadas sob essa ótica. Nem a herança econômica nem a cultural recebem peso moral independente. Uma pessoa cuja vida e relações são integralmente regidas por forças externas não é livre, pouco importando se a fonte da regência possa ser entendida como o sistema de mercado, autoritária, ou valores comunitários tradicionais. Isso não implica em um anarquismo radical ou em libertarianismo. Organizações, comunidades, e outras estruturas externas são intrinsecamente necessárias para os seres humanos florescerem e agirem livre e efetivamente. Isto significa, porém, que eu penso sobre essas estruturas apenas sob a perspectiva dos efeitos que elas têm sobre seres humanos. O seu valor é puramente derivativo de sua importância para os seres humanos reais que a habitam e são estruturados – para o bem ou para o mal - por ela. Do ponto de vista prático, isso coloca as preocupações com a estrutura do mercado e organização econômica muito mais próximas do centro das questões de liberdade do que a teoria liberal geralmente está disposta a colocar. Liberais têm tendido a deixar a estrutura básica da propriedade e mercados ou para os libertários – que, como Friedrich Hayek, aceitou os seus contornos atuais como “naturais”, e um elemento constituinte central da liberdade – ou para Marxistas e neo-Marxistas. Eu trato propriedade e mercados como apenas um domínio de ação humana, com capacidades e limitações. A sua presença aumenta a liberdade em algumas dimensões, mas os seus requisitos institucionais podem se tornar fontes de limitações quando esmagam a liberdade de ação em contextos fora do sistema de mercado. Calibrar o alcance do mercado, então, se torna central não apenas para a modelação da justiça ou bem estar, mas também para liberdade.

==== Onde fica o Estado? ====

O quarto e último ponto emerge em vários lugares por todo o livro, mas merece nota explícita aqui. O que eu acho novo e interessante sobre a economia de informação em rede é o surgimento de capacidades práticas individuais, e o papel que essas novas capacidades têm em aumentar a saliência de comportamentos individuais e sociais não proprietários e frequentemente fora do sistema de mercado.

Em minha discussão de autonomia e democracia, de justiça e cultura crítica, eu enfatizo o avanço de ações privadas individuais e cooperativas e a relativa diminuição da dominância de ações de mercado e proprietárias. Onde fica o estado em tudo isso? Na maior parte, como você verá particularmente no capítulo II, o estado em ambos Estados Unidos e Europa teve um papel em incentivar os residentes industriais de mercado do sistema de produção de informação do século vinte à custa dos indivíduos que compõem a economia de informação em rede emergente. A maior parte das intervenções estatais foi em forma ou de legislação capturada, servindo aos residentes, ou, no mínimo, esforços bem intencionados, mas mal elaborados para aperfeiçoar a ecologia institucional para modos ultrapassados de produção cultural e de informação. No mapeamento tradicional da teoria da política, uma posição como a que eu apresento aqui – que liberdade e justiça podem e devem ser mais bem alcançadas por uma combinação de ação de mercado e ação privada, voluntária (para não se dizer de caridade) e fora do sistema de mercado, e que o estado seja um ator relativamente suspeito – é libertária. Talvez, dado que eu sujeito a críticas similares as regras projetadas por seus proponentes como “propriedade” – é anarquista, focada no papel de ajuda mútua e altamente cética do estado. (Está um tanto quanto na moda hoje em dia ser um libertário, como tem sido por algumas décadas, e mais em moda ser um anarquista do que era há um século).

A verdade mais modesta é que a minha posição não é fundada em um ceticismo teórico sobre o estado, mas em um diagnóstico prático das oportunidades, barreiras, e estratégias para alcançar melhorias em liberdade e desenvolvimento humano dado os atuais estados da tecnologia, economia e política. Eu não tenho, em princípio, objeções a um estado liberal efetivo buscando um de uma gama de projetos e compromissos liberais. Aqui e por todo o livro você encontrará instâncias onde o estado pode ter um papel construtivo, se ele parasse de ouvir os residentes por tempo suficiente para percebê-lo. Isso inclui, por exemplo, financiamento municipal para redes neutras de banda larga, financiamento estatal para pesquisas básicas, e possíveis intervenções regulatórias estratégicas para impedir controle monopolista sobre recursos essenciais no ambiente digital. No entanto, a necessidade do papel afirmativo do estado é silenciada por causa de meu diagnóstico da trajetória específica dos mercados, em um lado, e ações individuais e sociais, pelo outro, no ambiente de informação em rede digital. A economia específica de computação e comunicação; a economia específica de produção cultural, de informação e conhecimento; e o papel relativo da informação em economias contemporâneas e avançadas se uniram para fazer ações individuais e sociais fora do sistema de mercado o mais importante domínio de ação no avanço desses compromissos liberais centrais. Dadas essas características específicas, há mais liberdade para ser encontrada através da abertura de espaços institucionais para ação voluntária e cooperativa do que há em ações estatais intencionais através do estado. Não obstante, eu não ofereço razões específicas para resistir a muitos dos papéis institucionais desenvolvidos pelo estado liberal. Eu não ofereço qualquer razão para pensar que, por exemplo, educação deveria parar de ser uma atividade primariamente pública e financiada pelo estado, e uma responsabilidade central do estado liberal, ou que a saúde pública não deva ser assim. Eu tenho todas as razões para acreditar que o crescimento da produção fora do sistema de mercado aumenta, ao invés de diminuir, a justificabilidade de financiamento estatal para ciência básica e pesquisa, uma vez que os efeitos de derramamento de produção de informação financiada pelo estado podem agora ser muito maiores e mais eficientemente disseminados e usados para aumentar o bem estar geral.

O fato novo importante sobre o ambiente em rede, porém, é a eficácia e centralidade de ação individual e coletiva. Na maioria dos domínios, liberdade de ação para indivíduos, sós e em cooperação frouxa com outros, pode alcançar muito do desiderato liberal que eu considero através deste livro. De uma perspectiva global, possibilitar que indivíduos ajam dessa forma também estende os benefícios da liberalização através das fronteiras, aumentando as capacidades de indivíduos em estados não liberais de agarrarem mais liberdade do que aqueles que controlam o seu sistema político gostariam. Por contraste, enquanto estados das mais avançadas economias de mercado continuarem a tentar aperfeiçoar seu sistema para acomodar os residentes da economia industrial de informação, eles tendem a ameaçar ao invés de apoiar os compromissos liberais. Uma vez que a economia de informação em rede estiver se estabilizado, e nós entendermos a importância relativa de ação privada voluntária fora dos mercados, o estado pode começar a ajustar suas políticas para facilitar ações fora do sistema de mercado e tirar vantagens dessas produções para melhorar seu próprio apoio aos compromissos liberais centrais.

=== O Cacife em Jogo: A Batalha pela Ecologia Institucional do Ambiente Digital ===

Nenhuma força histórica benevolente levará inexoravelmente este momento tecnológico-econômico a se desenvolver para um equilíbrio aberto, com diversidade e liberal.

Se a transformação que eu descrevo como possível ocorrer, ela levará a uma substancial redistribuição do poder e do dinheiro dos produtores de informação, cultura e comunicação do século vinte – como Hollywood, a indústria fonográfica, e talvez os transmissores de rádio e televisão e alguns dos gigantes dos serviços de telecomunicações – para uma combinação de populações amplamente difusas pelo globo, e os agentes de mercado que produzirão as ferramentas que farão essa população mais capaz de produzir o seu próprio ambiente de informação ao invés de comprá-lo pronto. Nenhum dos gigantes industriais de antes aceitarão essa realocação passivamente. A tecnologia não vencerá a resistência por meio de um impulso irresistível. A reorganização da produção e avanços que podem trazer em liberdade e justiça emergirão, portanto, apenas como resultado de ação social e política voltada para proteger os novos padrões sociais dos ataques dos residentes. É exatamente para desenvolver a compreensão do que está em jogo e porque vale a pena lutar por isso que eu escrevo este livro. Eu não ofereço garantias, porém, que isso de fato se concretizará.

A batalha pela relativa proeminência dos modelos proprietário e industrial de produção e troca de informação e a economia da informação emergente está acontecendo no domínio da ecologia institucional do ambiente digital. Em uma vasta gama de contextos, um conjunto similar de questões institucionais está sendo contestada: Até que ponto os recursos necessários para a produção e troca de informação serão reguladas como bens públicos, livres para o uso de todos e sem preferência de uso em favor de qualquer um? Até que ponto esses recursos serão integralmente proprietários e disponíveis apenas para aqueles atuando dentro do mercado ou dentro de formas tradicionais de ações bem fundeadas fora do sistema de mercado como a filantropia organizada pelo estado? Nós vemos esta batalha ocorrer em todas as camadas do ambiente informacional: os dispositivos físicos e canais de rede necessários à comunicação; a informação e recursos culturais existentes sobre as quais novas afirmações precisam feitas; os recursos lógicos – softwares e padrões – necessários para traduzir o que os seres humanos querem dizer uns aos outros para sinais que as máquinas possam processar e transmitir. A questão central é se haverá ou não uma infra-estrutura comum que será governada como um bem público e portanto disponível para todos que desejem participar do ambiente em rede de informação fora do ambiente proprietário e baseado no sistema de mercado.

Isso não significa que a propriedade é em algum sentido inerentemente ruim. A propriedade, juntamente com o contrato, é o componente institucional central dos mercados, e um elemento institucional central das sociedades liberais. É o que permite vendedores de extrair preços dos compradores, e compradores de saber que quando eles pagam estarão seguros na sua habilidade de usar o que eles compraram. Ela é a base de nossa capacidade de planejar ações que requerem o uso de recursos que, sem a exclusividade, estariam indisponíveis para o uso. Mas a propriedade também limita a ação. As regras de propriedade estão delineadas e voltadas para evocar um objetivo específico – interesse e capacidade de pagar pelo controle exclusivo sobre um recurso. Elas limitam o que uma pessoa ou outra podem fazer em relação àquele recurso; ou seja, usar de determinadas formas e não de outras, revelar ou esconder informações em relação a eles, e assim por diante. Estes limites são necessários para que as pessoas negociem entre si por meio de mercados, ao invés de pela força ou por redes sociais, mas elas o fazem à custa de limitar a ação fora do sistema de mercado na medida em que esta depende de acesso a esses recursos.

Bens públicos são outro elemento institucional central da liberdade de ação em sociedades livres, mas estão estruturados para possibilitar ação que não é fundada em controle exclusivo sobre os recursos necessários para a ação. Por exemplo, eu posso planejar uma festa ao ar livre com algum grau de certeza alugando um jardim ou praia privada, pelo sistema de propriedade. Alternativamente, eu posso planejar de encontrar meus amigos em uma praia pública ou no Sheep’s Meadow no Central Park. Eu posso comprar uma servidão de passagem do meu vizinho para chegar ao rio que passa ao lado, ou eu posso dar a volta na sua propriedade usando a estrada pública que faz parte dos nossos bens comuns de transporte. Cada sistema institucional – propriedade e bens públicos – permite uma certa liberdade de ação e um certo grau de previsibilidade do acesso aos recursos. A sua co-existência complementar e relativa proeminência como sistemas para ação determinam o alcance relativo do mercado e do domínio de ações fora do sistema de mercado, tanto individual como social, nos recursos que elas regulamentam e das atividades que dependem do acesso a estes recursos. Agora que as condições materiais permitiram a emersão de um escopo mais amplo para ações fora do sistema de mercado, o escopo e existência de uma infra-estrutura central e comum que inclui os recursos básicos necessários para produzir e trocar informações definirá o formato e o grau em que indivíduos poderão agir de todas as formas que eu descrevi como centrais para a emersão da economia de informação em rede e a liberdade que ela torna possível.

Na camada física, a transição para a banda larga tem sido acompanhada por uma estrutura de mercado mais concentrada por cabos e conexões físicas, e menor regulamentação do grau em que os proprietários podem controlar o fluxo de informação de suas redes. A emersão de redes sem fio abertas, baseadas em “espectros públicos”, vai em parte contra esta tendência, assim como a atual prática aparente do mercado na qual os proprietários de banda larga não utilizam a sua propriedade para controlar o fluxo de informações em suas redes. Esforços para superar a concentração no mercado de banda larga pelo desenvolvimento de redes municipais de banda larga são atualmente muito contestadas na legislação e nos tribunais. O desdobramento mais ameaçador na camada física foi um esforço envidado principalmente por Hollywood, nos últimos anos, para obrigar fabricantes de dispositivos computacionais para projetar os seus sistemas para executar pleitos e autorizações de detentores de direitos autorais de conteúdo digital. Se este esforço tiver sucesso, as características centrais dos computadores – de que eles são dispositivos para uso geral cujas habilidades podem ser configuradas e mudadas com o passar do tempo pelo seu proprietário conforme os seus usos e preferências mudem – será abandonado em favor de máquinas que podem ser confiadas para ter um desempenho de acordo com as especificações da fábrica, independentemente dos desejos de seu proprietário. A principal razão pela qual estas leis ainda não passaram, e provavelmente não passarão, é que as indústrias de hardware e software de computadores, de eletrônicos e de telecomunicações todas compreendem que tal lei diminuiria a sua criatividade e inovação. Na camada lógica, nós estamos vendo um esforço concentrado, novamente capitaneado primariamente por Hollywood e pela indústria fonográfica, para moldar os padrões de software para garantirem que produtos culturais digitalmente codificados possam continuar a serem vendidos como produtos embalados. O “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” e o ataque às tecnologias par-para-par são os mais óbvios neste aspecto.

De forma mais geral informação, conhecimento, e cultura estão sujeitos a um segundo movimento de fechamento, como James Boyle recentemente explorou com profundidade. A liberdade de ação de indivíduos que desejem produzir informação, conhecimento, e cultura está sendo sistematicamente limitada com o fim de assegurar o retorno econômico requerido pelos manufaturadores da economia industrial da informação. Uma rica literatura em Direito se desenvolveu em resposta a este crescente fechamento no correr dos últimos vinte anos. Começou com a evocativa exploração de David Lange do domínio público e a crítica visionária de Pamela Samuelson da aplicação de direitos autorais a programas de computadores e materiais digitais, e continuou com o trabalho de Jessica Litman sobre o domínio público e o direito autoral digital e a exploração de Boyle das assunções românticas básicas sustentando nossa construção de “propriedade intelectual” e a necessidade de um sistema para preservar o domínio público. Ela alcançou a sua mais eloqüente expressão nos argumentos de Lawrence Lessig pela centralidade da livre troca de idéias e informações para os nossos projetos mais criativos, e seu diagnóstico dos efeitos destrutivos no presente movimento de fechamento. Este crescente ceticismo dentre os acadêmicos de Direito tem se alinhado com o antigo ceticismo dentre economistas (ao qual eu dedico muita discussão no capítulo 2). A falta de fundação tanto empírica como analítica no esforço regulamentar em direção aos sempre mais fortes direitos proprietários não tem, porém, resultado em uma política alterada da regulamentação da produção intelectual. Apenas recentemente nós começamos a ver um jogo político sobre a política de informação e “propriedade intelectual” emergir de uma combinação política popular entre engenheiros computacionais, estudantes universitários, e ativistas preocupados com os pobres globais; uma reorientação de defensores da media tradicional; e uma percepção muito gradual por parte de empresas de alta tecnologia de que as regras defendidas por Hollywood podem impedir o crescimento da indústria relacionada aos computadores. Este contramovimento político está ligado a características bastante básicas da tecnologia de comunicação por computadores, e a práticas sociais persistentes e crescentes de compartilhamento – algumas, como o compartilhamento de arquivos p2p (par-para-par), em oposição direta a pleitos proprietários; outros, crescentemente, são instâncias de práticas emergentes de fazer informação em modelos não proprietários e de indivíduos compartilhando o que eles próprios fizerem socialmente, ao invés de padrões de mercado. Essas forças econômicas e sociais estão empurrando uma à outra em direções opostas, e cada uma está tentando moldar o ordenamento jurídico para melhor acomodar seus requisitos. Nós ainda estamos em um ponto no qual a produção de informação pode ser regulada de tal forma que, para a maioria dos usuários, ela será forçada de volta para o modelo industrial, esmagando o modelo emergente de produção individual, radicalmente descentralizada, e fora do sistema de mercado e suas conseqüentes melhoras para a liberdade e justiça.

A organização social e econômica não é infinitamente maleável. Tampouco é sempre aberta a um projeto afirmativo. As práticas de fato de interação humana com informação, conhecimento, e cultura e com a produção e consumo são conseqüência de um efeito de resposta entre práticas sociais, organização econômica, capacidades tecnológicas, e limitações formais no comportamento por meio de leis e instituições formais similares. Estes componentes de limitação e capacidades do comportamento humano tendem a se adaptar dinamicamente uma ao outro, de forma que a tensão entre as capacidades tecnológicas, as práticas econômicas e sociais, e a lei são frequentemente não muito grandes. Durante períodos de estabilidade, estes componentes da estrutura dentro dos quais seres humanos vivem estão na maior parte alinhados e se validam mutuamente, mas a estabilidade está sujeita a choque em qualquer dessas dimensões. Algumas vezes o choque vem em forma de uma crise econômica, como nos Estados Unidos durante a Grande Depressão. Frequentemente ele pode vir de uma ameaça física externa a instituições sociais, como uma guerra. Algumas vezes, apesar de provavelmente raramente, pode vir da lei, como poderia se argumentar, veio da decisão desagregadora em Brown vs. Board of Education. Algumas vezes pode vir da tecnologia; a introdução da imprensa mecânica foi uma perturbação, assim como o foi, certamente, o motor a vapor. A introdução da imprensa mecânica de alta capacidade introduziu a era da mídia de massa. A introdução do rádio causou uma perturbação similar, a qual por um breve momento desestabilizou o modelo da media de massa, mas rapidamente convergiu para este. Em cada caso, o período de perturbação ofereceu mais oportunidades e maiores riscos do que períodos de relativa estabilidade. Durante períodos de perturbação, uma maior parte da forma em que a sociedade se organiza está em jogo; mais pode ser renegociado, assim como vários outros componentes da estabilidade humana se ajustam a mudanças. Pegando emprestado o termo de teoria evolucionária usado por Stephen Jay Gould, sociedades humanas existem em uma série de equilíbrios pontuados. Os períodos de desequilíbrio não são necessariamente longos. Meros vinte e cinco anos se passaram entre a invenção do rádio e a sua adaptação ao modelo da mídia de massa. Um período similar se passou entre a introdução do telefone e a sua adoção da forma de monopólio utilitário que permitiu apenas comunicações limitadas um-para-um. Em cada um destes períodos, muitos caminhos poderiam ter sido seguidos. O rádio nos mostrou mesmo dentro do século passado como, em algumas sociedades, caminhos diferentes foram seguidos e depois sustentados através de décadas. Após um período de instabilidade, porém, os vários elementos de limitação do comportamento humano e das capacidades se estabelecem em um novo alinhamento estável. Durante períodos de estabilidades, nós podemos provavelmente esperar pouco mais do que retocar as arestas da condição humana.

Este livro é oferecido, portanto, como um desafio para democracias liberais contemporâneas. Nós estamos no meio de transformação tecnológica, econômica e organizacional que nos permite renegociar os termos da liberdade, justiça, e produtividade na sociedade da informação. Como nós viveremos neste novo ambiente dependerá em significante medida de escolhas em política que nós faremos na próxima década ou mais. Para que seja possível entender estas escolhas, e fazê-las, nós precisamos reconhecer que elas são parte do que é fundamentalmente uma escolha social e política – a escolha de como ser seres humanos livres, iguais e produtivos sob novas condições tecnológicas e econômicas. Como política econômica, permitir que os vencedores de ontem ditem os termos da competição econômica do amanhã seria desastroso. Como política social, perder uma oportunidade de enriquecer a democracia, liberdade e justiça em nossa sociedade enquanto mantendo ou até aumentando nossa produtividade seria imperdoável.

===Notas===

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 também é freqüentemente colocado no mesmo grupo de McLuhan and Walter Ong como um determinista tecnológico. Seu trabalho foi, porém, o de um economista político, e ele enfatizou a relação entre tecnologia e economia e organização social, muito mais do que a operação determinista da tecnologia sobre a cognição e capacidade humana.

4. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Nota do Tradutor: A palavra “código” é usada no sentido de “código fonte”, ou seja, linguagens de programação de informática que compõem os programas de computador em geral, e não no sentido de compilação de normas jurídicas como Código Civil, Código Penal, etc.

5. Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked Society (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).
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Prosseguir para o [[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 2|Capítulo 2]]

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Translations

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Yochai:

*[http://omniacommunia.org/ Italian Translation] and [http://www.stampa.unibocconi.it/articolo.php?ida=1422&idr=6 the official site]

*[http://www.atinachile.cl/pdf/wealth_of_networks4.pdf Spanish translation of chapter 4 (PDF), by Jaime Peña, Atina Chile] '''<broken link>'''
*[http://www.atinachile.cl/pdf/wealth_of_networks8.pdf Spanish translation of chapter 8 (PDF), by Omar Saint-Jean, Atina Chile] '''<broken link>'''
*[http://gruizlegal.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html Spanish translation of chapter 12]

*[[Translation to Brazilian Portuguese]]

*[[Russian Translation of Chapter 1]], by Alexander Gik (and in [http://www.e-belarus.org/docs/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_1_RU.pdf PDF])

Spanish Translation of chapter 12 (PDF), by Guillermo Ruiz, Madrid, España
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:TRADUCCION_AL_ESPAÑOL_CAPITULO_12_DE_LA_RIQUEZA_DE_LAS_REDES_DE_YOCHAI_BENKLER.pdf] '''<file was deleted from wikimedia commons>'''

Remixes

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Yochai:

====This book is available under a [http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike] license. Here's a list of projects building upon that freedom to make useful remixes.====

HTML Remix

* [http://libreria.sourceforge.net/library/The_Wealth_of_Networks/contents.html LIBREria.org ]
* [http://outsidethemarket.info Outside the Market: The Rise of Peer Production]
* [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/toc.html SiSU]

PDF Remix

* SiSU [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/landscape.pdf landscape]

Multiple Formats

* [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/sisu_manifest.html SiSU] ( [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 ] )

Searchable

* [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/sisu_manifest.html SiSU] [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/toc.html html]

Digitally-voiced audio

* [http://www.babblebooks.com/podcasts/WealthOfNetworks Babblebooks.com ]

Narration of Chapter 3

* [http://www.americanaphonic.com/pages/WealthNetworks.html Americana Phonic]

Narration of entire book

* [http://www.archive.org/details/wealthofnetworks Mike Benedetti]

TiddlyWiki Outline

* [http://wealthofnetworks.tiddlyspot.com/ Wealth of Networks @ TiddlySpot]

Talk:A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 1

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Yochai:

Part One

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Yochai:

↑ [[Table of Contents]] 
← [[1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge|Chapter 1]] | [[2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation|Chapter 2]] →

== Content ==

* [[Text Part One|Full text (wiki)]]

* [[Sentence-sliced Text Part One|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]

== Summary ==

Previous communications technologies (printing presses, telegraphs) centralized communication but the Internet provides "a radical reversal of this long trend". Technology doesn't guarantee what will happen, but it makes new things possible. This section investigates how.

Help:Contents

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Yochai:

Bulleted Chapter 1

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Yochai: Reverted edit of KayZ4h, changed back to last version by Ptj

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

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

=== Overview ===

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.

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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:
# it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves;
# 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
# 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:
# it makes culture more transparent, and
# 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.

=== Notes ===

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).

----

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

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John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

2007-08-18T10:24:45Z

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[[Table of Contents]] | [[Talk:John_Stuart_Mill%2C_On_Liberty|Discuss John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]]

----
"Human nature
is not a machine
to be built after a model,
and set to do exactly
the work prescribed for it,

but a tree
which requires to grow
and develop itself on all sides,
according to the tendency
of the inward forces
which make it
a living thing.

Such
are the differences
among human beings
in their sources of pleasure,
their susceptibilities of pain,
and the operation on them
of different physical and moral agencies,

that
unless there is
a corresponding diversity
in their modes of life,
they neither obtain their fair share of happiness,
nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature
of which their nature is capable."

''John Stuart Mill'', On Liberty (1859)

[[Table of Contents]] | [[Talk:John_Stuart_Mill%2C_On_Liberty|Discuss John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]]

Talk:5. Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law

2007-08-18T10:24:02Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of WvjVgd, changed back to last version by Ptj

Talk:Download PDFs of the book

2007-08-18T10:23:39Z

Yochai:

== Damaged PDF? ==

Umm... is it just me or is anyone else getting the message (from Adobe Reader) that the PDF they downloaded was damaged? My own download has no cover page and has these extra crop marks inside the top border of some pages --[[User:Lemi4|Lemi4]] 19:13, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

It would be nice if someone would be willing to convert this to an A4 friendly format as well. Here in Europe we don't have 8 1/2 x 11 paper. --[[User:Shmuel|Shmuel]] 06:10, 15 June 2007 (PDT)

Yochai Benkler

2007-08-18T10:23:00Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of RggD60, changed back to last version by Ptj

==The guy who wrote the book==

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

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

User:Grandpa Ruh

2007-08-18T10:22:10Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Ng8B8a, changed back to last version by Ptj

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Taoist-Quaker-Sufi, Grandpa Ruh - more widely known as Robert Pollard - is founder and Professor of Information Ecology of '''Information Habitat: Where Information Lives''', an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council. '''Information Habitat''' played a pioneering role in promoting the systematic use of ICT in support of broad-based participation and access to information by NGOs, beginning with the preparations for the 1992 '''Earth Summit''' in Rio de Janeiro through the 1996 '''Habitat II''' conference in Istanbul and beyond. He had become involved with the Earth Summit preparations by way of the '''Friends Committee on Unity with Nature''' guided, ''inter alia'', by a set of Quaker ''Queries on Opening to the Light'' [http://habitat.igc.org/queries/] and ''Queries on Unity with Nature'' [http://habitat.igc.org/queries/quwn.htm] and a concern for ''Foundations for a Sustainable Common Future'' [http://habitat.igc.org/values/fscf.htm]
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http://habitat.igc.org/la-perla-garden/gr-200x157-2006.05.08.jpg

By La Perla Garden compost May 10, 2006 ''Photo by [[User:MarcWish|Marc Wishengrad]]''
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Since the 1996 '''Habitat II''' conference in Istanbul, for which he established and managed the official web site and a core set of email lists, the cultivation and practice of information ecology as a holistic life science for a knowledge-based universe has been at the centre of his work, with special attention to the cascading global transition to the larger freedoms of a peaceful, just, sustainable and regenerative world governed by the laws of a knowledge-based universe.

Grandpa Ruh is currently developing a network of web sites for '''Climate Change 2.0''' [http://www.climate-change-two.net/] - based on a vision of harnessing the powers and powers of Web 2.0 and a knowledge-based universe in addressing the climate change crisis in support of the '''60th Annual NGO/DPI Conference''' to be held September 5-7 at UN Headquarters. His focus on climate change grew out of his work as Chair of the Information and Communications Sub-Committee of the '''NGO Committee on Education''' [http://www.ngo-education.net/] of '''CONGO''' - the '''C'''onference '''O'''f '''N'''on-'''G'''overnmental '''O'''rganizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations [http://www.ngocongo.org/] - in support of the Committee's commitment to the '''United Nations Decade on Education for Sustainable Development''' (2005-2014), the '''International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World''' (2001-2010) and the '''UN Millennium Development Goals''' [http://www.un-documents.net/mdg.htm]. He is developing a model template for an open source platform for the sites and for use by NGOs, community-based organizations and community development initiatives.

Since October 2006, most of the web sites he has developed have been based on the '''TiddlyWiki''' Open Source platform [http://www.tiddlywiki.com/] - a brilliant self-contained Wiki that serves as a stellar vehicle for a "networked information economy" - and on '''TiddlyPerfect''' [http://www.tiddlyperfect.net/] - a hybrid information species designed to combine the genius of TiddlyWiki with that of '''DataPerfect''' - a DOS-based companion of the legendary '''WordPerfect''' and arguably the most brilliant relational database ever written, that he has using since its release more than twenty years ago and that serves as the principal means of organizing the extensive archives of Information Habitat and to generate most of the web sites he has built.

The online dissemination and publication of UN documents has been a significant focus of Ruh's work, and he has been compiling an extensive body of more than five hundred key hyperlinked UN documents - global conference agreements, General Assembly resolutions, conventions, treaties, etc. relating to the above-mentioned decades - as the engine for a web site of these '''UN documents''' [http://www.un-documents.net]. Many of these documents had previously only been accessible as scanned pdf files; through the use of OCR software, the addition of hyperlinks and the integration in a database, these documents have not only gained a new life, but have been connected to the "ancestors" and "descendants" of the documents.

A lifelong organic gardener, inspired by his late mother's love of gardening and nature, Grandpa Ruh's perspective on information ecology has drawn deeply on his experiences in the garden, especially from the regenerative process of composting, and the principles of permaculture. He has recently become actively involved in '''La Perla Garden'''; a little-known neighborhood jewel and ''Green Thumb'' community garden at 105th Street and Columbus Avenue in what is officially known as ''Manhattan Valley'' although generally considered to be part of Manhattan's ''Upper West Side''. Naturally he is planning a web site for the garden which will include a ''tree school'' - in which trees are the teachers - and a biodiversity inventory and map of the garden and community, linked to web-based information - organized, inter alia on the ''Linnaean system of classification'' - on the trees, plants, insects, worms, rocks and other living things - including people and information species - that live in or visit the garden, and incorporating wiki spaces, blogs, vlogs, etc. on an open source, common content platform.

In the wake of the shocks and continuing aftershocks of September 11, 2001, Grandpa Ruh has increasingly returned to the original spiritual and interfaith basis of his relationship with the UN, serving on the New York City Task Force of the '''Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence''' [http://www.gandhi-king-season.net], is a member of the '''URI-UN Council''' - United Religions Initiative at the UN - and convenor of a network of '''Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circle''' [http://www.seasons-of-peace.net].

After reading ''Mathematics'' and ''Political Economy'' at '''Cambridge''', he had moved to the US in 1966 as a Research assistant on a "''Quantitative Analysis of the French Revolution''" at the ''Institute of Human Sciences'', '''Boston College''', and then to the ''Social Relations'' department at '''The Johns Hopkins University'''. In the context of his active involvement in the '''Vietnam Peace movement''' and the alternative culture of the Sixties, and a growing concern about academic links with the "military-industrial complex" he left academia in 1971 in favour of public and community service in support of peace, justice, and community development and the restoration of the environment.

Grandpa Ruh became the first librarian at '''Baltimore City Jail''' - where he established a number of programs, including an extensively-used law library, for more than eight years - followed by five years as an Administrative Analyst, during which time he introduced the use of microcomputers to the Jail, shortly after having co-founded, in 1981, the '''Baltimore Information Cooperative''' [http://habitat.igc.org/projects/bic.htm] that provided microcomputer support to community and progressive organizations.

Grandpa Ruh took on his current name in March 2005 in honour of his first grandchild and to acknowledge the name he had been given when he took hand as a dervish in the Nur Ashki-Jerrahi Sufi order. In the capacity of his work for the NGO Committee on Education, his name serves as a reminder to himself of the importance of paying special attention to the educational needs of the very youngest among us if sustainability, justice and peace are to be restored, and to prevail.

===Other Profiles===

: [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Information_Ecologist Information Ecologist @ Wikibooks]

: [http://profiles.takingitglobal.org/ecology2001 Grandpa Ruh @ TakingITGlobal]

: [http://www.commoncontent.org/user/279 Ruh Nabil @ Common Content]

: [http://grandpa-ruh.blogspot.com Reflections of Grandpa Ruh] - an occasional blog

===Web sites===

: [http://www.climate-change-two.net/ Climate Change 2.0]

: [http://www.tiddlyperfect.net/ TiddlyPerfect]

: [http://habitat.igc.org Information Habitat: Where Information Lives]

: [http://habitat.igc.org/light-cubes Light Cubes / Virtual Light & Colour Cubes - transformational icons of wholeness]

:: [http://www.digital-bridges.net/ Digital Bridges in Peace - an installation]

: [http://www.gandhi-king-season.net 2005 Gandhi-King Season for Non-Violence]

: [http://www.seasons-of-peace.net Seasons of Peace Cooperation Circles]

: [http://www.un-documents.net UN Documents: Gathering a body of global agreements]

===Key documents===

: [http://habitat.igc.org/queries Queries on Opening to the Light]

: [http://habitat.igc.org/queries/quwn.htm Queries on Unity with Nature]

: [http://habitat.igc.org/values/fscf.htm Foundations for a Sustainable Common Future]

: [http://habitat.igc.org/journey/index.html Invitation to a Journey: Habitat II Online]

===Bookmarking sites===

: [http://bluedot.us/users/Information-Ecologist Information Ecologist @ Blue Dot.us]

: [http://del.icio.us/grandpa_ruh Grandpa Ruh @ del.icio.us]

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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]]

----

== 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).

----

Proceed to [[Chapter 2]]

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

2007-08-18T10:21:15Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of JtvG56, changed back to last version by Ptj

[[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.

Talk:Organizational domains

2007-08-18T10:20:47Z

Yochai:

Talk:Yochai Benkler

2007-08-18T10:20:01Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of OrvN2v, changed back to last version by Ptj

User talk:Yochai

2007-08-18T10:19:21Z

Yochai:

<table width="625">
<tr valign="top">
<td>


== Welcome ==

== Thank you so much ==

Hello [[Yochai_Benkler|Mr. Benkler]], thank you so much for publishing your book under a creative commons licence. I noticed it because of a recommendation on Mr. Lessig's blog. I am already busy reading it. I am a Wikipedian, and I noticed that your article on Wikipedia does not have a photo. As Wikipedia is notoriously short on photos of living people, I thought I would go directly to the source and ask you to upload some photos to the Wikimedia Commons (the common media repository for re-use in all international Wikipedias).

In short: Three photos would be helpful. One portrait, one at your desk and one full size standing, under a free licence as in Wikipedias licence requirement (e.g. CC-BY-SA, GFDL or Public Domain). Thank you so much for your time. It is a great idea with the wiki.

[[User:Longbow4u|Longbow4u]] 03:07, 17 April 2006 (PDT)

:I forgot to add a link to first steps on Wikimedia Commons (here: [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps/Account First steps]). Pictures cannot be embedded in Wikipedia directly from the web (to safe server load). To upload a picture it is neccessary to
# create an account on Wikimedia Commons (then an '''upload link''' appears on left side of screen)
# upload file from local harddisk
# add basic information in summary field ('''description''': Yochai Benkler '''photographer''' (author):xy '''license''': e.g. <nowiki>{{GFDL}}</nowiki> (these infos are very important)
# When the file is uploaded, the head line <nowiki>[[Image:...jpg]]</nowiki> can be directly embedded in all wikipedias, and the image appears in the article.

[[User:Longbow4u|Longbow4u]] 03:48, 18 April 2006 (PDT)

== Congratulations and thanks ==

Yochai

Congratulations and many thanks for this ground-breaking book, and especially for publishing it under a Creative Commons licence and establishing this wiki space - a space that has the potential of becoming a center of excellence, upholding a great wealth of knowledge, in the virtually infinite, virtually free knowledge-based universe within which a new cradle of civilization is evolving. In a cascading process that continue to gain momentum towards this knowledge-based universe and that appears to be reaching a "tipping point", it will be the laws and properties of the networked information economy that will prevail. The transition seems inevitable, given that wealth in a knowledge-based universe is not constrained by the laws of conservation of mass and energy - information having zero mass and zero physical size - and is giving birth to a radically new meaning of ''free markets'', and the publication of the Wealth of Network is a major contribution to the transition.

I welcome the opportunity to contribute in such ways as I can to the growth and development of this wiki - which I have become deeply immersed in since receiving a message about The Wealth of Networks from the <nowiki><incom></nowiki> list - and to explore possible avenues of collaboration - e.g. in building on the initial stub I have written for the [[UN NGO community]] as the basis for a set of case studies - and for which I have compiled extensive digital archives - on the critical and evolving role of the networked information economy in the intensive growth in scale, diversity and modalities of civil society participation in the work of the United Nations since the beginning of preparations for the 1992 '''Earth Summit'''.

I fell in love with Wikipedia when I discovered it just over two years ago, however it was not too long before some of my contributions had led to successful ''Votes for deletion'' for pages on the evolution of [[information habitat|information habitats]] and [[information species]] and notably a page on [[red links]] that spoke of ''following the red link'' - entering an undefined space and planting the first seeds of presumed knowledge and understanding of an entity, trusting and committed to upholding the integrity of a self-correcting and evolving free information ecosystem - as analogous to ''swallowing the red pill'' in '''The Matrix''', but also to contribute to the establishment and development of pages relating to the Earth Summit and the UN NGO community and not before having had the opportunity to gain valuable insight and experience in the dynamics and architecture of [[Wiki spaces]], and and to identify some enhancements needed to strengthen the integrity of the Wiki engine and Wiki spaces. I look forward to sharing what I have learned and to learning from members in the Wealth of Network's Wiki community.

There is much more I would like to share, especially concerning '''La Perla Garden''' - 105th

== Invitation ==

Hi Prof. Benkler,

Although I've just started your book, I am very pleased to see your work in this area. I have added an reference to a wiki for a [http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/index.php/Category:C2_workshop conference on Command and Control (C2)] to your [[Growing_this_Wiki#Wiki_cross-pollination | Growing this Wiki]] page. We would be honored if you would be interested in participating in the conference. It is much broader than the term ''C2'' implies. Please look at the [http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/index.php/Category:C2_workshop conference wiki page]. (We have listed your book on our [http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/index.php/C2_references_and_links References and Links] page.)

[[User:Russ Abbott|Russ Abbott]] 20:39, 10 June 2007 (PDT)

Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks:Community Portal

2007-08-18T10:18:53Z

Yochai:

==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]]

Translation to Brazilian Portuguese

2007-08-18T10:18:23Z

Yochai:

'''A RIQUEZA DAS REDES'''

''Como a Produção Social Transforma os Mercados e a Liberdade''

tradução colaborativa para o português brasileiro.

A tradução para o Português brasileiro foi inicia por [[User:Felipe.sanches|Felipe.sanches]] 23:09, 17 July 2006 (PDT), que sugeriu uma abordagem "bit torrent" para a tradução. Comecei a colaborar em Novembro de 2006, e como o Felipe disse, é um texto pesado de ser traduzido. Para manter um padrão na terminologia estou preparando uma [[lista de termos]] que não tem correspondência no Português e que tive que criar para traduzir o texto.
Quem desejar colaborar vai notar que conforme a tradução vai prosseguindo, a parte em inglês que já foi traduzida é apagada. Portanto, é só ler a parte em Inglês e começar a traduzir. [[User:Joaoazeredo|Joaoazeredo]] 14:45, 11 January 2007 (PDT)

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 1|Capítulo 1]] Introdução: Um Momento de Oportunidade e de Desafio
* [[Parte Um|Parte I. A Economia da Informação em Rede]]
*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 2|Capítulo 2]] Economia Básica da Produção de Informação e Inovação

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 3|Capítulo 3]] Compartilhamento e ''peer production''

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 4|Capítulo 4]] A Economia da Produção Social

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Parte Dois|Parte Dois - Introdução]] Parte Dois. A Economia Política da Propriedade e do ''Commons''

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 5|Capítulo 5]] Liberdade Individual: Autonomia, Informação e Lei

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 6|Capítulo 6]] Liberdade Política Parte 1: A Encrenca com a Mídia de Massa

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 7|Capítulo 7]] Liberdade Política Parte 2: Urgência da Esfera Pública em Rede

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 8|Capítulo 8]] Liberdade Cultural: Uma Cultura tanto Plástica quanto Crítica

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 9|Capítulo 9]] Justiça e Desenvolvimento

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 10|Capítulo 10]] Vínculos Sociais: Juntos em Rede

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Parte Três|Parte Três - Introdução]] Parte Três. Políticas da Liberdade num Momento de Transformação

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 11|Capítulo 11]] A Batalha pela Ecologia Institucional do Ambiente Digital

*[[A Riqueza das Redes - Capítulo 12|Capítulo 12]] Conclusão: As Apostas das Políticas e Leis da Informação

11. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment

2007-08-18T10:16:36Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of XvgYxs, changed back to last version by Ptj

↑ [[Table of Contents]] 
← [[Part Three|Part Three]] | [[12. Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy|Chapter 12]] →

== Content ==

* [http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_11.pdf Full text (PDF)]
* [[Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 11|Full text, sentence-sliced (wiki)]]

== Summary ==

===Overview===

===Institutional Ecology and Path Dependence===

===The Physical Layer===
====Transport: Wires and Wireless====

[[Recent Developments in Broadband Regulation]]

====Devices====

[[A Perspective on Limiting Device Functionality]]

===The Logical Layer===
====The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998====
====The Battle over Peer-to-Peer Networks====
====The Domain Name System: From Public Trust to the Fetishism of Mnemonics====
====The Browser Wars====
====Free Software====

===The Content Layer===
====Copyright====
====Contractual Enclosure: Click-Wrap Licenses and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA====
====Trademark Dilution====
====Database Protection====
====Linking and Trespass to Chattels: New Forms of Information Exclusivity====
====International "Harmonization"====
====Countervailing Forces====

===The Problem of Security===
[[Wireless Network Security Concerns]]
==Sources==
===Sources cited in the chapter===
===Other relevant readings===
==Case Studies==
===Supporting examples===
===Counter-examples===
==Key Concepts==
==Critiques and Commentary==
[http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/A_Critique_of_Benkler%27s_Argument_for_a_Commons-Based_Content_Layer A Critique of Benkler's Argument for a Commons-Based Content Layer]

User talk:Grandpa Ruh

2007-08-18T10:16:09Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of QfeCg0, changed back to last version by Ptj

Thank you for your fantastic work here! [[User:FranzNahrada]]

Thanks for all the effort and hard work. As you can see, I slightly changed the front page and the table of contents. My thought on the front page was to maintain "above the fold" usability at the access point, so as not to direct people to one portion or another before they have a sense of where the overview is. I was concerned that the emphasis on part 1 and chapter 9 right at the front would do that, as well as making the "uses of this Wiki" which I think is very important appear "below the fold" for anyone wihtout a very long screen. As for the table of contents, I moved the front matter to the end, so that the initial access is to the substance, I removed the dedication, which I thought personal, and I made it clearer what the Mill quote was in relation to the book, because for those who have not seen the book it might have been confusing. Yochai

Thanks for rolling back the spam! [[User:Davidtannenbaum|Davidtannenbaum]] 13:00, 2 July 2006 (PDT)

== [[Disaster relief via internet]] ==

RE: [[User_talk:Jwalling]]

You may find these links of interest

:http://sourceforge.net/projects/sahana SourceForge
:http://www.reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Main_Page
::http://www.reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Sahana Wiki
::http://www.reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Schema:humanitarian Schema
::http://www.reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Standards Standards
:http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/09/05/recovery-20-a-call-to-convene/ Recovery 2.0
:http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_5/jones/index.html Open source disaster recovery
:http://worldwidehelp.blogspot.com/
:http://quakehelp.asiaquake.org/qh/index.php/Indonesia

--[[User:Jwalling|Jwalling]] 15:37, 10 June 2006 (PDT)

Chapter 9, section 4

2007-08-18T10:15:23Z

Yochai:

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

[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[9. Justice and Development|Chapter 9: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 9, section 4|Discuss Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries]]

----
== Chapter 9 Justice and Development, Section 4: Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries ==

=== 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 *===

The production of information and knowledge is very different from the production of steel or automobiles. [[Chapter 2]] explains in some detail that information production has always included substantial reliance on nonmarket actors and on nonmarket, nonproprietary settings as core modalities of production. In software, for example, we saw that Mickey and romantic maximizer-type producers, who rely on exclusive rights directly, have accounted for a stable 36-37 percent of market-based revenues for software developers, while the remainder was focused on both supply-side and demand-side improvements in the capacity to offer software services. This number actually overstates the importance of software publishing, because it does not at all count free software development except when it is monetized by an IBM or a Red Hat, leaving tremendous value unaccounted for. A very large portion of the investments and research in any of the information production fields important to human development occur within the category that I have broadly described as "Joe Einstein." These include both those places formally designated for the pursuit of information and knowledge in themselves, like universities, and those that operate in the social sphere, but produce information and knowledge as a more or less central part of their existence-like churches or political parties. Moreover, individuals acting as social beings have played a central role in our information production and exchange system. In order to provide a more sector-specific analysis of how commons-based, as opposed to proprietary, strategies can contribute to development, I offer here a more detailed breakdown specifically of software, scientific publication, agriculture, and biomedical innovation than is provided in chapter 2. Table 9.1 presents a higher-resolution statement of the major actors in these fields, within both the market and the nonmarket sectors, from which we can then begin to analyze the path toward, and the sustainability of, more significant commons-based production of the necessities of human development.

''Table 9.1: Map of Players and Roles in Major Relevant Sectors''

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" width="624">
<tr valign="top">
<td>
Actor
Sector
</td>
<td>
Government
</td>
<td>
Universities, Libraries, etc.
</td>
<td>
IP-Based Industry
</td>
<td>
Non-IP-Based Industry
</td>
<td>
NGOs/Nonprofits
</td>
<td>
Individuals
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>
Software
</td>
<td>
Research funding, defense, procurement
</td>
<td>
Basic research and design; components "incubate" much else
</td>
<td>
Software publishing (1/3 annual revenue)
</td>
<td>
Software services, customization (~2/3 annual revenue)
</td>
<td>
FSF; Apache; W3C; IETF
</td>
<td>
Free/open-source software
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>
Scientific publication
</td>
<td>
Research funding
</td>
<td>
University presses; salaries; promotion and tenure
</td>
<td>
Elsevier Science; professional associations
</td>
<td>
Biomed Central
</td>
<td>
PLoS; ArXiv
</td>
<td>
Working papers; Web-based self-publishing
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>
Agricultural Biotech
</td>
<td>
Grants and government labs; NARS
</td>
<td>
Basic research; tech transfer (24% of patenting activity)
</td>
<td>
Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta (~74% of patents)
</td>
<td>
No obvious equivalent
</td>
<td>
CAMBIA
BIOS
CGIAR
</td>
<td>
Farmers
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>
Biomed/Health
</td>
<td>
Grants and government labs
</td>
<td>
Basic research; tech transfer (~50%?)
</td>
<td>
Big Pharma; Biotech
(~50%?)
</td>
<td>
Generics
</td>
<td>
OneWorld Health
</td>
<td>
None
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Table 9.1 identifies the relative role of each of the types of main actors in information and knowledge production across the major sectors relevant to contemporary policy debates. It is most important to extract from this table the diversity of business models and roles not only in each industry, but also among industries. This diversity means that different types of actors can have different relative roles: nonprofits as opposed to individuals, universities as opposed to government, or nonproprietary market actors-that is, market actors whose business model is service based or otherwise does not depend on exclusive appropriation of information-as compared to nonmarket actors. The following segments look at each of these sectors more specifically, and describe the ways in which commons-based strategies are already, or could be, used to improve the access to information, knowledge, and the information-embedded goods and tools for human development. However, even a cursory look at the table shows that the current production landscape of software is particularly well suited to having a greater role for commons-based production. For example, exclusive proprietary producers account for only one-third of software-related revenues, even within the market. The remainder is covered by various services and relationships that are compatible with nonproprietary treatment of the software itself. Individuals and nonprofit associations also have played a very large role, and continue to do so, not only in free software development, but in the development of standards as well. As we look at each sector, we see that they differ in their incumbent industrial landscape, and these differences mean that each sector may be more or less amenable to commons-based strategies, and, even if in principle amenable, may present harder or easier transition problems.

=== 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]]

=== Chapter 9: Notes ===

: [[Chapter 9: Notes]]

----
[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] |[[Table of Contents]] | [[9. Justice and Development|Chapter 9: Summary]] [[Talk:Chapter 9, section 4|Discuss Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries]]

</tr>
</td>

Sandbox

2007-08-18T10:14:57Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of BfdM4g, changed back to last version by Ptj

This is the proper place to experiment with this wiki.

Please feel free to add or delete contents from this page.

[[Paragraphs]]

[[Sentences]]

=== Derivatives: Essays, Critiques, Comments, ... ===

[[Comments on paragraph 12/7]]

[[Table 2.1]]

-----

[[Table 3.1]]

[[Table 6.1]]

[[Table 8.1]]

[[Table 9.1]]

[[Table 9.2]]

[[Table 11.1]]
[[Image:Example.jpg]][[Image:Example.jpg]]

----

Visual editor: bold, italic, IntLink, ExtLink, Levl2Head, EmbImage, MediaLink, Math, NoWiki, Signature, HorLine

Sintax is given by application on empty region, then applying NoWiki on the whole lot:

<nowiki>'''Bold text''' ''Italic text'' [[Link title]] [http://www.example.com link title] [[Image:Example.jpg]] [[Media:Example.ogg]] <math>Insert formula here</math>
</nowiki>

Some examples:

IntLink: [[Table 11.1]]

Normal running text turned into link: http://WoN.incubadora.fapesp.br

ExtLink: [http://WoN.incubadora.fapesp.br Portal WoN na Incubadora]

Lev2Head:

== Level 2 Heading ==

EmbImage: External images can not be uploaded on this wiki, I do not know where the internal images are (book cover, for instance)

Signature:

--[[User:Imres|Imres]] 02:05, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

HorLine:

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8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical

2007-08-18T10:14:32Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Eh3Dlr, changed back to last version by Ptj

[[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==

Chapter 2, section 1

2007-08-18T10:14:04Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of If7Ca6, changed back to last version by Ptj

<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|Discuss The Diversity of Strategies in our Current Information Production System]]

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== Chapter 2 Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation ==

=== Introduction ===

: [[Chapter 2]]

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

The actual universe of information production in the economy then, is not as dependent on property rights and markets in information goods as the last quarter century's increasing obsession with "intellectual property" might suggest. Instead, what we see both from empirical work and theoretical work is that individuals and firms in the economy produce information using a wide range of strategies. Some of these strategies indeed rely on exclusive rights like patents or copyrights, and aim at selling information as a good into an information market. Many, however, do not. In order to provide some texture to what these models look like, we can outline a series of ideal-type "business" strategies for producing information. The point here is not to provide an exhaustive map of the empirical business literature. It is, instead, to offer a simple analytic framework within which to understand the mix of strategies available for firms and individuals to appropriate the benefits of their investments - of time, money, or both, in activities that result in the production of information, knowledge, and culture. The differentiating parameters are simple: cost minimization and benefit maximization. Any of these strategies could use inputs that are already owned - such as existing lyrics for a song or a patented invention to improve on - by buying a license from the owner of the exclusive rights for the existing information. Cost minimization here refers purely to ideal-type strategies for obtaining as many of the information inputs as possible at their marginal cost of zero, instead of buying licenses to inputs at a positive market price. It can be pursued by using materials from the public domain, by using materials the producer itself owns, or by sharing/bartering for information inputs owned by others in exchange for one's own information inputs. Benefits can be obtained either in reliance on asserting one's exclusive rights, or by following a non-exclusive strategy, using some other mechanism that improves the position of the information producer because they invested in producing the information. Nonexclusive strategies for benefit maximization can be pursued both by market actors and by nonmarket actors. Table 2.1 maps nine ideal-type strategies characterized by these components.

'''Table 2.1: Ideal-Type Information Production Strategies'''

<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="3" width="624">
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Cost Minimization/ Benefit Acquisition
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Public Domain
</td>
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Intrafirm
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Barter/Sharing
</td>
</tr>
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<td colspan="4">
----
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</tr>
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<td>
 
Rights-based exclusion (make money by exercising exclusive rights-licensing or blocking competition)
</td>
<td>
 
Romantic Maximizers (authors, composers; sell to publishers; sometimes sell to Mickeys)
</td>
<td>
 
Mickey (Disney reuses inventory for derivative works; buy outputs of Romantic Maximizers)
</td>
<td>
 
RCA (small number of companies hold blocking patents; they create patent pools to build valuable goods)
</td>
</tr>
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<td>
 
Nonexclusion-Market (make money from information production but not by exercising the exclusive rights)
</td>
<td>
 
Scholarly Lawyers (write articles to get clients; other examples include bands that give music out for free as advertisements for touring and charge money for performance; software developers who develop software and make money from customizing it to a particular client, on-site management, advice and training, not from licensing)
</td>
<td>
 
Know-How (firms that have cheaper or better production processes because of their research, lower their costs or improve the quality of other goods or services; lawyer offices that build on existing forms)
</td>
<td>
 
Learning Networks (share information with similar organizations - make money from early access to information. For example, newspapers join together to create a wire service; firms where engineers and scientists from different firms attend professional societies to diffuse knowledge)
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>
 
Nonexclusion-Nonmarket
</td>
<td>
 
Joe Einstein (give away information for free in return for status, benefits to reputation, value of the innovation to themselves; wide range of motivations. Includes members of amateur choirs who perform for free, academics who write articles for fame, people who write op-eds, contribute to mailing lists; many free software developers and free software generally for most uses)
</td>
<td>
 
Los Alamos (share in-house information, rely on in-house inputs to produce valuable public goods used to secure additional government funding and status)
</td>
<td>
 
Limited sharing networks (release paper to small number of colleagues to get comments so you can improve it before publication. Make use of time delay to gain relative advantage later on using Joe Einstein strategy. Share one's information on formal condition of reciprocity: like "copyleft" conditions on derivative works for distribution)
</td>
</tr>
</table>

The ideal-type strategy that underlies patents and copyrights can be thought of as the "Romantic Maximizer." It conceives of the information producer as a single author or inventor laboring creatively - hence romantic - but in expectation of royalties, rather than immortality, beauty, or truth. An individual or small start-up firm that sells software it developed to a larger firm, or an author selling rights to a book or a film typify this model. The second ideal type that arises within exclusive-rights based industries, "Mickey," is a larger firm that already owns an inventory of exclusive rights, some through in-house development, some by buying from Romantic Maximizers. A defining cost-reduction mechanism for Mickey is that it applies creative people to work on its own inventory, for which it need not pay above marginal cost prices in the market. This strategy is the most advantageous in an environment of very strong exclusive rights protection for a number of reasons. First, the ability to extract higher rents from the existing inventory of information goods is greatest for firms that (a) have an inventory and (b) rely on asserting exclusive rights as their mode of extracting value. Second, the increased costs of production associated with strong exclusive rights are cushioned by the ability of such firms to rework their existing inventory, rather than trying to work with materials from an ever-shrinking public domain or paying for every source of inspiration and element of a new composition. The coarsest version of this strategy might be found if Disney were to produce a "winter sports" thirty-minute television program by tying together scenes from existing cartoons, say, one in which Goofy plays hockey followed by a snippet of Donald Duck ice skating, and so on. More subtle, and representative of the type of reuse relevant to the analysis here, would be the case where Disney buys the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, and, after producing an animated version of stories from the original books, then continues to work with the same characters and relationships to create a new film, say, Winnie-the-Pooh-Frankenpooh (or Beauty and the Beast-Enchanted Christmas; or The Little Mermaid-Stormy the Wild Seahorse). The third exclusive-rights-based strategy, which I call "RCA," is barter among the owners of inventories. Patent pools, cross-licensing, and market-sharing agreements among the radio patents holders in 1920-1921, which I describe in chapter 6, are a perfect example. RCA, GE, AT&T, and Westinghouse held blocking patents that prevented each other and anyone else from manufacturing the best radios possible given technology at that time. The four companies entered an agreement to combine their patents and divide the radio equipment and services markets, which they used throughout the 1920s to exclude competitors and to capture precisely the postinnovation monopoly rents sought to be created by patents.

Exclusive-rights-based business models, however, represent only a fraction of our information production system. There are both market-based and nonmarket models to sustain and organize information production. Together, these account for a substantial portion of our information output. Indeed, industry surveys concerned with patents have shown that the vast majority of industrial R&D is pursued with strategies that do not rely primarily on patents. This does not mean that most or any of the firms that pursue these strategies possess or seek no exclusive rights in their information products. It simply means that their production strategy does not depend on asserting these rights through exclusion. One such cluster of strategies, which I call "Scholarly Lawyers," relies on demand-side effects of access to the information the producer distributes. It relies on the fact that sometimes using an information good that one has produced makes its users seek out a relationship with the author. The author then charges for the relationship, not for the information. Doctors or lawyers who publish in trade journals, become known, and get business as a result are an instance of this strategy. An enormously creative industry, much of which operates on this model, is software. About two-thirds of industry revenues in software development come from activities that the Economic Census describes as: (1) writing, modifying, testing, and supporting software to meet the needs of a particular customer; (2) planning and designing computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication technologies; (3) on-site management and operation of clients' computer systems and/or data processing facilities; and (4) other professional and technical computer-related advice and services, systems consultants, and computer training. "Software publishing," by contrast, the business model that relies on sales based on copyright, accounts for a little more than one-third of the industry's revenues./8 Interestingly, this is the model of appropriation that more than a decade ago, Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow heralded as the future of music and musicians. They argued in the early 1990s for more or less free access to copies of recordings distributed online, which would lead to greater attendance at live gigs. Revenue from performances, rather than recording, would pay artists.

The most common models of industrial R&D outside of pharmaceuticals, however, depend on supply-side effects of information production. One central reason to pursue research is its effects on firm-specific advantages, like production know-how, which permit the firm to produce more efficiently than competitors and sell better or cheaper competing products. Daily newspapers collectively fund news agencies, and individually fund reporters, because their ability to find information and report it is a necessary input into their product-timely news. As I have already suggested, they do not need copyright to protect their revenues. Those are protected by the short half-life of dailies. The investments come in order to be able to play in the market for daily newspapers. Similarly, the learning curve and know-how effects in semiconductors are such that early entry into the market for a new chip will give the first mover significant advantages over competitors. Investment is then made to capture that position, and the investment is captured by the quasi-rents available from the first-mover advantage. In some cases, innovation is necessary in order to be able to produce at the state of the art. Firms participate in "Learning Networks" to gain the benefits of being at the state of the art, and sharing their respective improvements. However, they can only participate if they innovate. If they do not innovate, they lack the in-house capacity to understand the state of the art and play at it. Their investments are then recouped not from asserting their exclusive rights, but from the fact that they sell into one of a set of markets, access into which is protected by the relatively small number of firms with such absorption capacity, or the ability to function at the edge of the state of the art. Firms of this sort might barter their information for access, or simply be part of a small group of organizations with enough knowledge to exploit the information generated and informally shared by all participants in these learning networks. They obtain rents from the concentrated market structure, not from assertion of property rights./9

An excellent example of a business strategy based on nonexclusivity is IBM's. The firm has obtained the largest number of patents every year from 1993 to 2004, amassing in total more than 29,000 patents. IBM has also, however, been one of the firms most aggressively engaged in adapting its business model to the emergence of free software.

'''Figure 2.1: Selected IBM Revenues, 2000-2003'''

http://habitat.igc.org/wealth-of-networks/figure-2-1.gif

Figure 2.1 shows what happened to the relative weight of patent royalties, licenses, and sales in IBM's revenues and revenues that the firm described as coming from "Linux-related services." Within a span of four years, the Linux-related services category moved from accounting for practically no revenues, to providing double the revenues from all patent-related sources, of the firm that has been the most patent-productive in the United States. IBM has described itself as investing more than a billion dollars in free software developers, hired programmers to help develop the Linux kernel and other free software; and donated patents to the Free Software Foundation. What this does for the firm is provide it with a better operating system for its server business - making the servers better, faster, more reliable, and therefore more valuable to consumers. Participating in free software development has also allowed IBM to develop service relationships with its customers, building on free software to offer customer-specific solutions. In other words, IBM has combined both supply-side and demand-side strategies to adopt a nonproprietary business model that has generated more than $2 billion yearly of business for the firm. Its strategy is, if not symbiotic, certainly complementary to free software.

I began this chapter with a puzzle - advanced economies rely on nonmarket organizations for information production much more than they do in other sectors. The puzzle reflects the fact that alongside the diversity of market-oriented business models for information production there is a wide diversity of nonmarket models as well. At a broad level of abstraction, I designate this diversity of motivations and organizational forms as "Joe Einstein" - to underscore the breadth of the range of social practices and practitioners of nonmarket production. These include universities and other research institutes; government research labs that publicize their work, or government information agencies like the Census Bureau. They also include individuals, like academics; authors and artists who play to "immortality" rather than seek to maximize the revenue from their creation. Eric von Hippel has for many years documented user innovation in areas ranging from surfboard design to new mechanisms for pushing electric wiring through insulation tiles./10 The Oratorio Society of New York, whose chorus members are all volunteers, has filled Carnegie Hall every December with a performance of Handel's Messiah since the theatre's first season in 1891. Political parties, advocacy groups, and churches are but few of the stable social organizations that fill our information environment with news and views. For symmetry purposes in table 2.1, we also see reliance on internal inventories by some nonmarket organizations, like secret government labs that do not release their information outputs, but use it to continue to obtain public funding. This is what I call "Los Alamos." Sharing in limited networks also occurs in nonmarket relationships, as when academic colleagues circulate a draft to get comments. In the nonmarket, nonproprietary domain, however, these strategies were in the past relatively smaller in scope and significance than the simple act of taking from the public domain and contributing back to it that typifies most Joe Einstein behaviors. Only since the mid-1980s have we begun to see a shift from releasing into the public domain to adoption of commons-binding licensing, like the "copyleft" strategies I describe in chapter 3. What makes these strategies distinct from Joe Einstein is that they formalize the requirement of reciprocity, at least for some set of rights shared.

My point is not to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways we produce information. It is simply to offer some texture to the statement that information, knowledge, and culture are produced in diverse ways in contemporary society. Doing so allows us to understand the comparatively limited role that production based purely on exclusive rights-like patents, copyrights, and similar regulatory constraints on the use and exchange of information - has played in our information production system to this day. It is not new or mysterious to suggest that nonmarket production is important to information production. It is not new or mysterious to suggest that efficiency increases whenever it is possible to produce information in a way that allows the producer - whether market actor or not - to appropriate the benefits of production without actually charging a price for use of the information itself. Such strategies are legion among both market and nonmarket actors. Recognizing this raises two distinct questions: First, how does the cluster of mechanisms that make up intellectual property law affect this mix? Second, how do we account for the mix of strategies at any given time? Why, for example, did proprietary, market-based production become so salient in music and movies in the twentieth century, and what is it about the digitally networked environment that could change this mix?

=== 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 ===

: [[Chapter 2, section 4]]

=== Notes ===

8. 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).

9. Levin et al., "Appropriating the Returns," 794-796 (secrecy, lead time, and learning-curve 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.

10. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

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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|Discuss The Diversity of Strategies in our Current Information Production System]]
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== Chapter 2 Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation ==

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35

There are no noncommercial automobile manufacturers.

There are no volunteer steel foundries.

You would never choose to have your primary source of bread depend on voluntary contributions from others.

Nevertheless, scientists working at noncommercial research institutes funded by nonprofit educational institutions and government grants produce most of our basic science.

Widespread cooperative networks of volunteers write the software and standards that run most of the Internet and enable what we do with it.

Many people turn to National Public Radio or the BBC as a reliable source of news.

What is it about information that explains this difference?

Why do we rely almost exclusively on markets and commercial firms to produce cars, steel, and wheat, but much less so for the most critical information our advanced societies depend on?

Is this a historical contingency, or is there something about information as an object of production that makes nonmarket production attractive?

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The technical economic answer is that certain characteristics of information and culture lead us to understand them as "public goods," rather than as "pure private goods" or standard "economic goods."

When economists speak of information, they usually say that it is "nonrival."

We consider a good to be nonrival when its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another.

Once such a good is produced, no more social resources need be invested in creating more of it to satisfy the next consumer.

Apples are rival.

If I eat this apple, you cannot eat it.

If you nonetheless want to eat an apple, more resources (trees, labor) need to be diverted from, say, building chairs, to growing apples, to satisfy you.

The social cost of your consuming the second apple is the cost of not using the resources needed to grow the second apple (the wood from the tree) in their next best use.

In other words, it is the cost to society of not having the additional chairs that could have been made from the tree.

Information is nonrival.

Once a scientist has established a fact, or once Tolstoy has written War and Peace, neither the scientist nor Tolstoy need spend a single second on producing additional War and Peace manuscripts or studies for the one-hundredth, one-thousandth, or one-millionth user of what they wrote.

The physical paper for the book or journal costs something, but the information itself need only be created once.

Economists call such goods "public" because a market will not produce them if priced at their marginal cost-zero.

In order to provide Tolstoy or the scientist with income, we regulate publishing: We pass laws that enable their publishers to prevent competitors from entering the market.

Because no competitors are permitted into the market for copies of War and Peace, the publishers can price the contents of the book or journal at above their actual marginal cost of zero.

They can then turn some of that excess revenue over to Tolstoy.

Even if these laws are therefore necessary to create the incentives for publication, the market that develops based on them will, from the technical economic perspective, systematically be inefficient.

As Kenneth Arrow put it in 1962, "precisely to the extent that [property] is effective, there is underutilization of the information."1

Because welfare economics defines a market as producing a good efficiently only when it is pricing the good at its marginal cost, a good like information (and culture and knowledge are, for purposes of economics, forms of information), which can never be sold both at a positive (greater than zero) price and at its marginal cost, is fundamentally a candidate for substantial nonmarket production.

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This widely held explanation of the economics of information production has led to an understanding that markets based on patents or copyrights involve a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency.

That is, looking at the state of the world on any given day, it is inefficient that people and firms sell the information they possess.

From the perspective of a society's overall welfare, the most efficient thing would be for those who possess information to give it away for free-or rather, for the cost of communicating it and no more.

On any given day, enforcing copyright law leads to inefficient underutilization of copyrighted information.

However, looking at the problem of information production over time, the standard defense of exclusive rights like copyright expects firms and people not to produce if they know that their products will be available for anyone to take for free.

In order to harness the efforts of individuals and firms that want to make money, we are willing to trade off some static inefficiency to achieve dynamic efficiency.

That is, we are willing to have some inefficient lack of access to information every day, in exchange for getting more people involved in information production over time.

Authors and inventors or, more commonly, companies that contract with musicians and filmmakers, scientists, and engineers, will invest in research and create cultural goods because they expect to sell their information products.

Over time, this incentive effect will give us more innovation and creativity, which will outweigh the inefficiency at any given moment caused by selling the information at above its marginal cost.

This defense of exclusive rights is limited by the extent to which it correctly describes the motivations of information producers and the business models open to them to appropriate the benefits of their investments.

If some information producers do not need to capture the economic benefits of their particular information outputs, or if some businesses can capture the economic value of their information production by means other than exclusive control over their products, then the justification for regulating access by granting copyrights or patents is weakened.

As I will discuss in detail, both of these limits on the standard defense are in fact the case.

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Nonrivalry, moreover, is not the only quirky characteristic of information production as an economic phenomenon.

The other crucial quirkiness is that information is both input and output of its own production process.

In order to write today's academic or news article, I need access to yesterday's articles and reports.

In order to write today's novel, movie, or song, I need to use and rework existing cultural forms, such as story lines and twists.

This characteristic is known to economists as the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, recalling a statement attributed to Isaac Newton: "If I have seen farther it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."2

This second quirkiness of information as a production good makes property-like exclusive rights less appealing as the dominant institutional arrangement for information and cultural production than it would have been had the sole quirky characteristic of information been its nonrivalry.

The reason is that if any new information good or innovation builds on existing information, then strengthening intellectual property rights increases the prices that those who invest in producing information today must pay to those who did so yesterday, in addition to increasing the rewards an information producer can get tomorrow.

Given the nonrivalry, those payments made today for yesterday's information are all inefficiently too high, from today's perspective.

They are all above the marginal cost-zero.

Today's users of information are not only today's readers and consumers.

They are also today's producers and tomorrow's innovators.

Their net benefit from a strengthened patent or copyright regime, given not only increased potential revenues but also the increased costs, may be negative.

If we pass a law that regulates information production too strictly, allowing its beneficiaries to impose prices that are too high on today's innovators, then we will have not only too little consumption of information today, but also too little production of new information for tomorrow.

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Perhaps the most amazing document of the consensus among economists today that, because of the combination of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, excessive expansion of "intellectual property" protection is economically detrimental, was the economists' brief filed in the Supreme Court case of Eldred v. Ashcroft.3

The case challenged a law that extended the term of copyright protection from lasting for the life of the author plus fifty years, to life of the author plus seventy years, or from seventy-five years to ninety-five years for copyrights owned by corporations.

If information were like land or iron, the ideal length of property rights would be infinite from the economists' perspective.

In this case, however, where the "property right" was copyright, more than two dozen leading economists volunteered to sign a brief opposing the law, counting among their number five Nobel laureates, including that well-known market skeptic, Milton Friedman.

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39

The efficiency of regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through strong copyright and patent is not only theoretically ambiguous, it also lacks empirical basis.

The empirical work trying to assess the impact of intellectual property on innovation has focused to date on patents.

The evidence provides little basis to support stronger and increasing exclusive rights of the type we saw in the last two and a half decades of the twentieth century.

Practically no studies show a clear-cut benefit to stronger or longer patents.4 In perhaps one of the most startling papers on the economics of innovation published in the past few years, Josh Lerner looked at changes in intellectual property law in sixty countries over a period of 150 years.

He studied close to three hundred policy changes, and found that, both in developing countries and in economically advanced countries that already have patent law, patenting both at home and abroad by domestic firms of the country that made the policy change, a proxy for their investment in research and development, decreases slightly when patent law is strengthened!5

The implication is that when a country-either one that already has a significant patent system, or a developing nation-increases its patent protection, it slightly decreases the level of investment in innovation by local firms.

Going on intuitions alone, without understanding the background theory, this seems implausible-why would inventors or companies innovate less when they get more protection?

Once you understand the interaction of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, the findings are entirely consistent with theory.

Increasing patent protection, both in developing nations that are net importers of existing technology and science, and in developed nations that already have a degree of patent protection, and therefore some nontrivial protection for inventors, increases the costs that current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own contributions.

When one cuts through the rent-seeking politics of intellectual property lobbies like the pharmaceutical companies or Hollywood and the recording industry; when one overcomes the honestly erroneous, but nonetheless conscience-soothing beliefs of lawyers who defend the copyright and patent-dependent industries and the judges they later become, the reality of both theory and empirics in the economics of intellectual property is that both in theory and as far as empirical evidence shows, there is remarkably little support in economics for regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through the tools of intellectual property law.

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39

Where does innovation and information production come from, then, if it does not come as much from intellectual-property-based market actors, as many generally believe?

The answer is that it comes mostly from a mixture of (1) nonmarket sources-both state and nonstate-and (2) market actors whose business models do not depend on the regulatory framework of intellectual property.

The former type of producer is the expected answer, within mainstream economics, for a public goods problem like information production.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Department are major sources of funding for research in the United States, as are government agencies in Europe, at the national and European level, Japan, and other major industrialized nations.

The latter type-that is, the presence and importance of market-based producers whose business models do not require and do not depend on intellectual property protection-is not theoretically predicted by that model, but is entirely obvious once you begin to think about it.

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40

Consider a daily newspaper.

Normally, we think of newspapers as dependent on copyrights.

In fact, however, that would be a mistake.

No daily newspaper would survive if it depended for its business on waiting until a competitor came out with an edition, then copied the stories, and reproduced them in a competing edition.

Daily newspapers earn their revenue from a combination of low-priced newsstand sales or subscriptions together with advertising revenues.

Neither of those is copyright dependent once we understand that consumers will not wait half a day until the competitor's paper comes out to save a nickel or a quarter on the price of the newspaper.

If all copyright on newspapers were abolished, the revenues of newspapers would be little affected.6

Take, for example, the 2003 annual reports of a few of the leading newspaper companies in the United States.

The New York Times Company receives a little more than $3 billion a year from advertising and circulation revenues, and a little more than $200 million a year in revenues from all other sources.

Even if the entire amount of "other sources" were from syndication of stories and photos-which likely overstates the role of these copyright-dependent sources-it would account for little more than 6 percent of total revenues.

The net operating revenues for the Gannett Company were more than $5.6 billion in newspaper advertising and circulation revenue, relative to about $380 million in all other revenues.

As with the New York Times, at most a little more than 6 percent of revenues could be attributed to copyright-dependent activities.

For Knight Ridder, the 2003 numbers were $2.8 billion and $100 million, respectively, or a maximum of about 3.5 percent from copyrights.

Given these numbers, it is safe to say that daily newspapers are not a copyright-dependent industry, although they are clearly a market-based information production industry.

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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.7

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.

The term "intellectual property" has high cultural visibility today.

Hollywood, the recording industry, and pharmaceuticals occupy center stage on the national and international policy agenda for information policy.

However, in the overall mix of our information, knowledge, and cultural production system, the total weight of these exclusivity-based market actors is surprisingly small relative to the combination of nonmarket sectors, government and nonprofit, and market-based actors whose business models do not depend on proprietary exclusion from their information outputs.

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The upshot of the mainstream economic analysis of information production today is that the widely held intuition that markets are more or less the best way to produce goods, that property rights and contracts are efficient ways of organizing production decisions, and that subsidies distort production decisions, is only very ambiguously applicable to information.

While exclusive rights-based production can partially solve the problem of how information will be produced in our society, a comprehensive regulatory system that tries to mimic property in this area-such as both the United States and the European Union have tried to implement internally and through international agreements-simply cannot work perfectly, even in an ideal market posited by the most abstract economics models.

Instead, we find the majority of businesses in most sectors reporting that they do not rely on intellectual property as a primary mechanism for appropriating the benefits of their research and development investments.

In addition, we find mainstream economists believing that there is a substantial role for government funding; that nonprofit research can be more efficient than for-profit research; and, otherwise, that nonproprietary production can play an important role in our information production system.

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

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41

The actual universe of information production in the economy then, is not as dependent on property rights and markets in information goods as the last quarter century's increasing obsession with "intellectual property" might suggest.

Instead, what we see both from empirical work and theoretical work is that individuals and firms in the economy produce information using a wide range of strategies.

Some of these strategies indeed rely on exclusive rights like patents or copyrights, and aim at selling information as a good into an information market.

Many, however, do not.

In order to provide some texture to what these models look like, we can outline a series of ideal-type "business" strategies for producing information.

The point here is not to provide an exhaustive map of the empirical business literature.

It is, instead, to offer a simple analytic framework within which to understand the mix of strategies available for firms and individuals to appropriate the benefits of their investments-of time, money, or both, in activities that result in the production of information, knowledge, and culture.

The differentiating parameters are simple: cost minimization and benefit maximization.

Any of these strategies could use inputs that are already owned-such as existing lyrics for a song or a patented invention to improve on-by buying a license from the owner of the exclusive rights for the existing information.

Cost minimization here refers purely to ideal-type strategies for obtaining as many of the information inputs as possible at their marginal cost of zero, instead of buying licenses to inputs at a positive market price.

It can be pursued by using materials from the public domain, by using materials the producer itself owns, or by sharing/bartering for information inputs owned by others in exchange for one's own information inputs.

Benefits can be obtained either in reliance on asserting one's exclusive rights, or by following a non-exclusive strategy, using some other mechanism that improves the position of the information producer because they invested in producing the information.

Nonexclusive strategies for benefit maximization can be pursued both by market actors and by nonmarket actors.

Table 2.1 maps nine ideal-type strategies characterized by these components.

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The ideal-type strategy that underlies patents and copyrights can be thought of as the "Romantic Maximizer."

It conceives of the information producer as a single author or inventor laboring creatively-hence romantic-but in expectation of royalties, rather than immortality, beauty, or truth.

An individual or small start-up firm that sells software it developed to a larger firm, or an author selling rights to a book or a film typify this model.

The second ideal type that arises within exclusive-rights based industries, "Mickey," is a larger firm that already owns an inventory of exclusive rights, some through in-house development, some by buying from Romantic Maximizers.

A defining cost-reduction mechanism for Mickey is that it applies creative people to work on its own inventory, for which it need not pay above marginal cost prices in the market.

This strategy is the most advantageous in an environment of very strong exclusive rights protection for a number of reasons.

First, the ability to extract higher rents from the existing inventory of information goods is greatest for firms that (a) have an inventory and (b) rely on asserting exclusive rights as their mode of extracting value.

Second, the increased costs of production associated with strong exclusive rights are cushioned by the ability of such firms to rework their existing inventory, rather than trying to work with materials from an ever-shrinking public domain or paying for every source of inspiration and element of a new composition.

The coarsest version of this strategy might be found if Disney were to produce a "winter sports" thirty-minute television program by tying together scenes from existing cartoons, say, one in which Goofy plays hockey followed by a snippet of Donald Duck ice skating, and so on.

More subtle, and representative of the type of reuse relevant to the analysis here, would be the case where Disney buys the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, and, after producing an animated version of stories from the original books, then continues to work with the same characters and relationships to create a new film, say, Winnie-the-Pooh-Frankenpooh (or Beauty and the Beast-Enchanted Christmas; or The Little Mermaid-Stormy the Wild Seahorse).

The third exclusive-rights-based strategy, which I call "RCA," is barter among the owners of inventories.

Patent pools, cross-licensing, and market-sharing agreements among the radio patents holders in 1920-1921, which I describe in chapter 6, are a perfect example.

RCA, GE, AT&T, and Westinghouse held blocking patents that prevented each other and anyone else from manufacturing the best radios possible given technology at that time.

The four companies entered an agreement to combine their patents and divide the radio equipment and services markets, which they used throughout the 1920s to exclude competitors and to capture precisely the postinnovation monopoly rents sought to be created by patents.

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{{:Table 2.1}}

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Exclusive-rights-based business models, however, represent only a fraction of our information production system.

There are both market-based and nonmarket models to sustain and organize information production.

Together, these account for a substantial portion of our information output.

Indeed, industry surveys concerned with patents have shown that the vast majority of industrial R&D is pursued with strategies that do not rely primarily on patents.

This does not mean that most or any of the firms that pursue these strategies possess or seek no exclusive rights in their information products.

It simply means that their production strategy does not depend on asserting these rights through exclusion.

One such cluster of strategies, which I call "Scholarly Lawyers," relies on demand-side effects of access to the information the producer distributes.

It relies on the fact that sometimes using an information good that one has produced makes its users seek out a relationship with the author.

The author then charges for the relationship, not for the information.

Doctors or lawyers who publish in trade journals, become known, and get business as a result are an instance of this strategy.

An enormously creative industry, much of which operates on this model, is software.

About two-thirds of industry revenues in software development come from activities that the Economic Census describes as: (1) writing, modifying, testing, and supporting software to meet the needs of a particular customer; (2) planning and designing computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication technologies; (3) on-site management and operation of clients' computer systems and/or data processing facilities; and (4) other professional and technical computer-related advice and services, systems consultants, and computer training.

"Software publishing," by contrast, the business model that relies on sales based on copyright, accounts for a little more than one-third of the industry's revenues.8

Interestingly, this is the model of appropriation that more than a decade ago, Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow heralded as the future of music and musicians.

They argued in the early 1990s for more or less free access to copies of recordings distributed online, which would lead to greater attendance at live gigs.

Revenue from performances, rather than recording, would pay artists.

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The most common models of industrial R&D outside of pharmaceuticals, however, depend on supply-side effects of information production.

One central reason to pursue research is its effects on firm-specific advantages, like production know-how, which permit the firm to produce more efficiently than competitors and sell better or cheaper competing products.

Daily newspapers collectively fund news agencies, and individually fund reporters, because their ability to find information and report it is a necessary input into their product-timely news.

As I have already suggested, they do not need copyright to protect their revenues.

Those are protected by the short half-life of dailies.

The investments come in order to be able to play in the market for daily newspapers.

Similarly, the learning curve and know-how effects in semiconductors are such that early entry into the market for a new chip will give the first mover significant advantages over competitors.

Investment is then made to capture that position, and the investment is captured by the quasi-rents available from the first-mover advantage.

In some cases, innovation is necessary in order to be able to produce at the state of the art.

Firms participate in "Learning Networks" to gain the benefits of being at the state of the art, and sharing their respective improvements.

However, they can only participate if they innovate.

If they do not innovate, they lack the in-house capacity to understand the state of the art and play at it.

Their investments are then recouped not from asserting their exclusive rights, but from the fact that they sell into one of a set of markets, access into which is protected by the relatively small number of firms with such absorption capacity, or the ability to function at the edge of the state of the art.

Firms of this sort might barter their information for access, or simply be part of a small group of organizations with enough knowledge to exploit the information generated and informally shared by all participants in these learning networks.

They obtain rents from the concentrated market structure, not from assertion of property rights.9

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An excellent example of a business strategy based on nonexclusivity is IBM's.

The firm has obtained the largest number of patents every year from 1993 to 2004, amassing in total more than 29,000 patents.

IBM has also, however, been one of the firms most aggressively engaged in adapting its business model to the emergence of free software.

Figure 2.1 shows what happened to the relative weight of patent royalties, licenses, and sales in IBM's revenues and revenues that the firm described as coming from "Linux-related services."

Within a span of four years, the Linux-related services category moved from accounting for practically no revenues, to providing double the revenues from all patent-related sources, of the firm that has been the most patent-productive in the United States.

IBM has described itself as investing more than a billion dollars in free software developers, hired programmers to help develop the Linux kernel and other free software; and donated patents to the Free Software Foundation.

What this does for the firm is provide it with a better operating system for its server business-making the servers better, faster, more reliable, and therefore more valuable to consumers.

Participating in free software development has also allowed IBM to develop service relationships with its customers, building on free software to offer customer-specific solutions.

In other words, IBM has combined both supply-side and demand-side strategies to adopt a nonproprietary business model that has generated more than $2 billion yearly of business for the firm.

Its strategy is, if not symbiotic, certainly complementary to free software.

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Figure 2.1: Selected IBM Revenues, 2000-2003

http://habitat.igc.org/wealth-of-networks/figure-2-1.gif

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I began this chapter with a puzzle-advanced economies rely on nonmarket organizations for information production much more than they do in other sectors.

The puzzle reflects the fact that alongside the diversity of market-oriented business models for information production there is a wide diversity of nonmarket models as well.

At a broad level of abstraction, I designate this diversity of motivations and organizational forms as "Joe Einstein"-to underscore the breadth of the range of social practices and practitioners of nonmarket production.

These include universities and other research institutes; government research labs that publicize their work, or government information agencies like the Census Bureau.

They also include individuals, like academics; authors and artists who play to "immortality" rather than seek to maximize the revenue from their creation.

Eric von Hippel has for many years documented user innovation in areas ranging from surfboard design to new mechanisms for pushing electric wiring through insulation tiles.10

The Oratorio Society of New York, whose chorus members are all volunteers, has filled Carnegie Hall every December with a performance of Handel's Messiah since the theatre's first season in 1891.

Political parties, advocacy groups, and churches are but few of the stable social organizations that fill our information environment with news and views.

For symmetry purposes in table 2.1, we also see reliance on internal inventories by some nonmarket organizations, like secret government labs that do not release their information outputs, but use it to continue to obtain public funding.

This is what I call "Los Alamos."

Sharing in limited networks also occurs in nonmarket relationships, as when academic colleagues circulate a draft to get comments.

In the nonmarket, nonproprietary domain, however, these strategies were in the past relatively smaller in scope and significance than the simple act of taking from the public domain and contributing back to it that typifies most Joe Einstein behaviors.

Only since the mid-1980s have we begun to see a shift from releasing into the public domain to adoption of commons-binding licensing, like the "copyleft" strategies I describe in chapter 3.

What makes these strategies distinct from Joe Einstein is that they formalize the requirement of reciprocity, at least for some set of rights shared.

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My point is not to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways we produce information.

It is simply to offer some texture to the statement that information, knowledge, and culture are produced in diverse ways in contemporary society.

Doing so allows us to understand the comparatively limited role that production based purely on exclusive rights-like patents, copyrights, and similar regulatory constraints on the use and exchange of information-has played in our information production system to this day.

It is not new or mysterious to suggest that nonmarket production is important to information production.

It is not new or mysterious to suggest that efficiency increases whenever it is possible to produce information in a way that allows the producer-whether market actor or not-to appropriate the benefits of production without actually charging a price for use of the information itself.

Such strategies are legion among both market and nonmarket actors.

Recognizing this raises two distinct questions:

First, how does the cluster of mechanisms that make up intellectual property law affect this mix?

Second, how do we account for the mix of strategies at any given time?

Why, for example, did proprietary, market-based production become so salient in music and movies in the twentieth century, and what is it about the digitally networked environment that could change this mix?

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=== The Effects of Exclusive Rights ===

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Music in the nineteenth century was largely a relational good.

It was something people did in the physical presence of each other: in the folk way through hearing, repeating, and improvising; in the middle-class way of buying sheet music and playing for guests or attending public performances; or in the upper-class way of hiring musicians.

Capital was widely distributed among musicians in the form of instruments, or geographically dispersed in the hands of performance hall (and drawing room) owners.

Market-based production depended on performance through presence.

It provided opportunities for artists to live and perform locally, or to reach stardom in cultural centers, but without displacing the local performers.

With the introduction of the phonograph, a new, more passive relationship to played music was made possible in reliance on the high-capital requirements of recording, copying, and distributing specific instantiations of recorded music-records.

What developed was a concentrated, commercial industry, based on massive financial investments in advertising, or preference formation, aimed at getting ever-larger crowds to want those recordings that the recording executives had chosen.

In other words, the music industry took on a more industrial model of production, and many of the local venues-from the living room to the local dance hall-came to be occupied by mechanical recordings rather than amateur and professional local performances.

This model crowded out some, but not all, of the live-performance-based markets (for example, jazz clubs, piano bars, or weddings), and created new live-performance markets-the megastar concert tour.

The music industry shifted from a reliance on Scholarly Lawyer and Joe Einstein models to reliance on Romantic Maximizer and Mickey models.

As computers became more music-capable and digital networks became a ubiquitously available distribution medium, we saw the emergence of the present conflict over the regulation of cultural production-the law of copyright-between the twentieth-century, industrial model recording industry and the emerging amateur distribution systems coupled, at least according to its supporters, to a reemergence of decentralized, relation-based markets for professional performance artists.

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This stylized story of the music industry typifies the mass media more generally.

Since the introduction of the mechanical press and the telegraph, followed by the phonograph, film, the high-powered radio transmitter, and through to the cable plant or satellite, the capital costs of fixing information and cultural goods in a transmission medium-a high-circulation newspaper, a record or movie, a radio or television program-have been high and increasing.

The high physical and financial capital costs involved in making a widely accessible information good and distributing it to the increasingly larger communities (brought together by better transportation systems and more interlinked economic and political systems) muted the relative role of nonmarket production, and emphasized the role of those firms that could muster the financial and physical capital necessary to communicate on a mass scale.

Just as these large, industrial-age machine requirements increased the capital costs involved in information and cultural production, thereby triggering commercialization and concentration of much of this sector, so too ubiquitously available cheap processors have dramatically reduced the capital input costs required to fix information and cultural expressions and communicate them globally.

By doing so, they have rendered feasible a radical reorganization of our information and cultural production system, away from heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated business models and toward greater reliance on nonproprietary appropriation strategies, in particular nonmarket strategies whose efficacy was dampened throughout the industrial period by the high capital costs of effective communication.

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Information and cultural production have three primary categories of inputs.

The first is existing information and culture.

We already know that existing information is a nonrival good-that is, its real marginal cost at any given moment is zero.

The second major cost is that of the mechanical means of sensing our environment, processing it, and communicating new information goods.

This is the high cost that typified the industrial model, and which has drastically declined in computer networks.

The third factor is human communicative capacity-the creativity, experience, and cultural awareness necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural resources and turn them into new insights, symbols, or representations meaningful to others with whom we converse.

Given the zero cost of existing information and the declining cost of communication and processing, human capacity becomes the primary scarce resource in the networked information economy.

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Human communicative capacity, however, is an input with radically different characteristics than those of, say, printing presses or satellites.

It is held by each individual, and cannot be "transferred" from one person to another or aggregated like so many machines.

It is something each of us innately has, though in divergent quanta and qualities.

Individual human capacities, rather than the capacity to aggregate financial capital, become the economic core of our information and cultural production.

Some of that human capacity is currently, and will continue to be, traded through markets in creative labor.

However, its liberation from the constraints of physical capital leaves creative human beings much freer to engage in a wide range of information and cultural production practices than those they could afford to participate in when, in addition to creativity, experience, cultural awareness and time, one needed a few million dollars to engage in information production.

From our friendships to our communities we live life and exchange ideas, insights, and expressions in many more diverse relations than those mediated by the market.

In the physical economy, these relationships were largely relegated to spaces outside of our economic production system.

The promise of the networked information economy is to bring this rich diversity of social life smack into the middle of our economy and our productive lives.

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Let's do a little experiment.

Imagine that you were performing a Web search with me.

Imagine that we were using Google as our search engine, and that what we wanted to do was answer the questions of an inquisitive six-year-old about Viking ships.

What would we get, sitting in front of our computers and plugging in a search request for "Viking Ships"?

The first site is Canadian, and includes a collection of resources, essays, and worksheets.

An enterprising elementary school teacher at the Gander Academy in Newfoundland seems to have put these together.

He has essays on different questions, and links to sites hosted by a wide range of individuals and organizations, such as a Swedish museum, individual sites hosted on geocities, and even to a specific picture of a replica Viking ship, hosted on a commercial site dedicated to selling nautical replicas.

In other words, it is a Joe Einstein site that points to other sites, which in turn use either Joe Einstein or Scholarly Lawyer strategies.

This multiplicity of sources of information that show up on the very first site is then replicated as one continues to explore the remaining links.

The second link is to a Norwegian site called "the Viking Network," a Web ring dedicated to preparing and hosting short essays on Vikings.

It includes brief essays, maps, and external links, such as one to an article in Scientific American.

"To become a member you must produce an Information Sheet on the Vikings in your local area and send it in electronic format to Viking Network. Your info-sheet will then be included in the Viking Network web."

The third site is maintained by a Danish commercial photographer, and hosted in Copenhagen, in a portion dedicated to photographs of archeological finds and replicas of Danish Viking ships.

A retired professor from the University of Pittsburgh runs the fourth.

The fifth is somewhere between a hobby and a showcase for the services of an individual, independent Web publisher offering publishing-related services.

The sixth and seventh are museums, in Norway and Virginia, respectively.

The eighth is the Web site of a hobbyists' group dedicated to building Viking Ship replicas.

The ninth includes classroom materials and teaching guides made freely available on the Internet by PBS, the American Public Broadcasting Service.

Certainly, if you perform this search now, as you read this book, the rankings will change from those I saw when I ran it; but I venture that the mix, the range and diversity of producers, and the relative salience of nonmarket producers will not change significantly.

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The difference that the digitally networked environment makes is its capacity to increase the efficacy, and therefore the importance, of many more, and more diverse, nonmarket producers falling within the general category of Joe Einstein.

It makes nonmarket strategies-from individual hobbyists to formal, well-funded nonprofits-vastly more effective than they could be in the mass-media environment.

The economics of this phenomenon are neither mysterious nor complex.

Imagine the grade-school teacher who wishes to put together ten to twenty pages of materials on Viking ships for schoolchildren.

Pre-Internet, he would need to go to one or more libraries and museums, find books with pictures, maps, and text, or take his own photographs (assuming he was permitted by the museums) and write his own texts, combining this research.

He would then need to select portions, clear the copyrights to reprint them, find a printing house that would set his text and pictures in a press, pay to print a number of copies, and then distribute them to all children who wanted them.

Clearly, research today is simpler and cheaper.

Cutting and pasting pictures and texts that are digital is cheaper.

Depending on where the teacher is located, it is possible that these initial steps would have been insurmountable, particularly for a teacher in a poorly endowed community without easy access to books on the subject, where research would have required substantial travel.

Even once these barriers were surmounted, in the precomputer, pre-Internet days, turning out materials that looked and felt like a high quality product, with high-resolution pictures and maps, and legible print required access to capital-intensive facilities.

The cost of creating even one copy of such a product would likely dissuade the teacher from producing the booklet.

At most, he might have produced a mimeographed bibliography, and perhaps some text reproduced on a photocopier.

Now, place the teacher with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection, at home or in the school library.

The cost of production and distribution of the products of his effort are trivial.

A Web site can be maintained for a few dollars a month.

The computer itself is widely accessible throughout the developed world.

It becomes trivial for a teacher to produce the "booklet"-with more information, available to anyone in the world, anywhere, at any time, as long as he is willing to spend some of his free time putting together the booklet rather than watching television or reading a book.

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When you multiply these very simple stylized facts by the roughly billion people who live in societies sufficiently wealthy to allow cheap ubiquitous Internet access, the breadth and depth of the transformation we are undergoing begins to become clear.

A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day.

In order to harness these billions of hours, it would take the whole workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty-hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years!

Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience.

They have diverse interests-as diverse as human culture itself.

Some care about Viking ships, others about the integrity of voting machines.

Some care about obscure music bands, others share a passion for baking.

As Eben Moglen put it, "if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network.

It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone."11

It is this combination of a will to create and to communicate with others, and a shared cultural experience that makes it likely that each of us wants to talk about something that we believe others will also want to talk about, that makes the billion potential participants in today's online conversation, and the six billion in tomorrow's conversation, affirmatively better than the commercial industrial model.

When the economics of industrial production require high up-front costs and low marginal costs, the producers must focus on creating a few superstars and making sure that everyone tunes in to listen or watch them.

This requires that they focus on averaging out what consumers are most likely to buy.

This works reasonably well as long as there is no better substitute.

As long as it is expensive to produce music or the evening news, there are indeed few competitors for top billing, and the star system can function.

Once every person on the planet, or even only every person living in a wealthy economy and 10-20 percent of those living in poorer countries, can easily talk to their friends and compatriots, the competition becomes tougher.

It does not mean that there is no continued role for the mass-produced and mass-marketed cultural products-be they Britney Spears or the broadcast news.

It does, however, mean that many more "niche markets"-if markets, rather than conversations, are what they should be called-begin to play an ever-increasing role in the total mix of our cultural production system.

The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen-more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost.

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The known quirky characteristics of information and knowledge as production goods have always given nonmarket production a much greater role in this production system than was common in capitalist economies for tangible goods.

The dramatic decline in the cost of the material means of producing and exchanging information, knowledge, and culture has substantially decreased the costs of information expression and exchange, and thereby increased the relative efficacy of nonmarket production.

When these facts are layered over the fact that information, knowledge, and culture have become the central high-value-added economic activities of the most advanced economies, we find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar social and economic condition.

Social behavior that traditionally was relegated to the peripheries of the economy has become central to the most advanced economies.

Nonmarket behavior is becoming central to producing our information and cultural environment.

Sources of knowledge and cultural edification, through which we come to know and comprehend the world, to form our opinions about it, and to express ourselves in communication with others about what we see and believe have shifted from heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated media, to being produced on a much more widely distributed model, by many actors who are not driven by the imperatives of advertising or the sale of entertainment goods.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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=== Notes ===

1. 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.

2. Suzanne Scotchmer, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative Research and the Patent Law," Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 29-41.

3. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003).

4. Adam Jaffe, "The U.S. Patent System in Transition: Policy Innovation and the Innovation Process," Research Policy 29 (2000): 531.

5. Josh Lerner, "Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years" (working paper no. 8977, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2002).

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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).

9. Levin et al., "Appropriating the Returns," 794-796 (secrecy, lead time, and learning-curve 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.

10. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

11. Eben Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright," First Monday (1999), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/.

-----

Chapter 9: Notes

2007-08-18T10:11:51Z

Yochai:

[[Chapter 9]]

== Chapter 9: Notes ==

1. Anne Alstott and Bruce Ackerman, ''The Stakeholder Society'' (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

2. Numbers are all taken from the ''2004 Human Development Report'' (New York: UN Development Programme, 2004).

3. Amartya Sen, ''Development as Freedom'' (New York: Knopf, 1999), 46-47.

4. Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, ''Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers'' (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000), 273.

5. Harold Varmus, ''E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences'' (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1999).

6. 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."

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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).

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. USDA National Agriculture Statistics Survey (2004), http://www.usda.gov/nass/aggraphs/fncht3.htm

13. 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.

14. Robert E. Evenson, "GMOs: Prospects for Productivity Increases in Developing Countries," ''Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization'' 2 (2004): article 2.

15. Elliot Marshall, "A Deal for the Rice Genome," ''Science'' 296 (April 2002): 34.

16. Jikun Huang et al., "Plant Biotechnology in China," ''Science'' 295 (2002): 674.

17. Huang et al., "Plant Biotechnology."

18. Richard Atkinson et al., "Public Sector Collaboration for Agricultural IP Management," ''Science'' 301 (2003): 174.

19. 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.

20. Wim Broothaertz et al., "Gene Transfer to Plants by Diverse Species of Bacteria," ''Nature'' 433 (2005): 629.

21. These numbers and others in this paragraph are taken from the 2004 WHO ''World Health Report'', Annex Table 2.

22. 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.

23. 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).

24. See Jean Lanjouw, "A New Global Patent Regime for Diseases: U.S. and International Legal Issues," ''Harvard Journal of Law & Technology'' 16 (2002).

25. 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.

UN NGO community

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Yochai: Reverted edit of YpxT58, changed back to last version by Ptj

== 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}}

User:Ownut

2007-08-18T10:10:04Z

Yochai:

Beer will be Free as in Freedom (not zero price) when any qualified artisan can bid to rent the Land and Capital needed to produce that beer, and when a contract (perhaps a lease) causes that rent to be a 'function' of holding - so that all the resources are available "at cost", and everyone gets a chance because nobody is allowed to hoard.

http://ecocomics.org

Template:Footer

2007-08-18T10:09:02Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of NooGuu, changed back to last version by Ptj

Chapter 9

2007-08-18T10:08:39Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of EmaRld, changed back to last version by Ptj

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

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

----

== 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]]

----

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

Talk:Sentence-sliced Text Chapter 1

2007-08-17T15:37:01Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of TvbU9q, changed back to last version by Imres

I liked the idea of Bulleted text but producing the bulleted text is very time-consuming. Also, I am not sure there is a consensus where the bullets should be and at what depth?

On the other hand I found that the space added format makes the reading easier. It is also superior if you need to print the text and you want to annotate your printed version.

Since I am teaching a class in Brazil where I use the book and many of my students have no means to acquire the book in the printed version, I decided I better make a new format which solves these problems.

I called the new format "sentence-sliced text". The idea is simple: paragraphs are separated by horizontal lines, below which we record the page where the paragraph begins and a blank line is inserted between sentences.

I prepare this version importing the text from the html version, applying a few macros on it and recording the pages where paragraphs begin. That's all.

[[User:imres|Imre Simon]], 01Sep06

Chapter 1

2007-08-17T02:38:52Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Mo3G1o, changed back to last version by Ptj

<table width="650">
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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]]

----

== 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).

----

Proceed to [[Chapter 2]]

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Cialis online

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Yochai: removed spam

== 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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Growing this Wiki

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Yochai: Reverted edit of PfdRb2, changed back to last version by Yochai

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[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] | [[Table of Contents]]

=Help this Wiki grow=

==Integrate full text with Wiki==

: ''"In certain ways, a wiki is of course the ideal format for such a project, allowing as it does for multiple, collaborative authorship and a relatively boundless expansion. But the wiki seems also to maintain a separation between the primary text and its related paratexts -- here are the static PDFs from which the author speaks, and here are the malleable wiki pages on which readers chime in. How might we imagine bringing those voices into closer conversation?"''
:: * Kathleen Fitzpatrick [http://www.futureofthebook.org/academicpress/2006/04/the_wealth_of_networks.html]

* For this to be truly useful, the full text of the book should be integrated with the wiki. Let's put the book's theories into practice.

:* Some of the text is now available on this wiki: [[Acknowledgments]], [[Chapter 1]], [[Bulleted Chapter 1]], [[Part One]], [[Chapter 2]] and [[Chapter 9]]

===Non-editable pages in a wiki===

* The issue of full integration with a wiki version of the full text does, however, raises some methodological issues concerning wiki spaces and published documents, as there would appear to be a legitimate need to maintain a true copy - with "protected" pages - of the original text that would however allow the inclusion of Wiki links - i.e. for concepts, people, etc. A protected page can only be edited by someone with administrative privileges. Ideally, there would be - and perhaps there is - a way of giving limited administrative privilege that to would allow users who have agreed to limit editing of the original text to the addition of Wiki links.

* The use of protected pages would also be of value in a number of other contexts, including in Wikipedia and the broader context of [[access to knowledge]], and would allow, for example, the inclusion of the text of global agreements, conventions, treaties, etc, to be embedded in a Wiki environment without jeopardizing the integrity of the document.

==Use of illustrations==

* It would be great to have the book's illustrations available for commentary.

:* The [[illustrations]] are now available as remote images, through use of their URLs, as the file upload feature is currently disabled for this Wiki space. If you want to add other illustrations, you need to have the images posted on a different site.

==Ease of reading==

===Difficult sentences===

* I have just started reading that book and I found many sentences that I have difficulties with understanding. In the spirit of 'peer production' I am thinking about recording a list of such sentences here so that editors of the future version of the book could ease the readers work. Would there be a value in such a list?

:Here are some examples:

: p18 "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." (what change?)

:: From the context, this appears to be a small error of omission, that should have read: "My own emphasis is on the specific '''change in''' 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."

: p21 "given that I subject to similar criticism rules styled by their proponents as “property”"

: p29 "High-volume mechanical presses and the telegraph combined with new business practices to change newspapers from small-circulation local efforts into mass media." (what is the predicate here?)

:: Zby: Yochai is using the word "combined" as a past-tense verb. The presses and the telegraph are subjects of the sentence. "combined with new..." is the predicate. - Ady

::: Ady: I do believe that those sentences do have sense - but still if others would have to stumble upon them and need to stop to think about their meaning then perhaps it would be useful to edit them. It all depends how many other readers would have similar difficulties as mine. -- Zby

:: In the [[acknowledgments]] section, [[User:Yochai|Yochai Benkler]] confesses to a tendency towards "excessively long sentences". Given the significance of the book, considerations of ease of comprehension - with a particular concern for those whose native language is not English - would appear worthy of attention.

: p120 "As these conditions change, the relative scope for social-sharing practices to play a role in production changes." (scope to play role - somehow awkward)

: p126 "Instead, managers must be able to identify patterns that emerge in the community and inspire trust that they are correctly judging the patterns that are valuable from the perspective of the users, not only the enterprise, so that the users in fact coalesce around and extend these patterns."

===Long paragraphs===

* Related to this, many of the paragraphs could reasonably be characterized as excessively long, and include weighty sentences with the result that there may well be a good number of prospective readers who find The Wealth of Network somewhat difficult to digest in its original format.

====Bulleted chapters====

: By providing distinctive paragraph breaks and double-spacing between sentences, and adding as many levels of outline bullets as suggest themselves, the books seems to be much easier to read. See, for example, [[Bulleted Chapter 1]]

==Contributing / participating==

: Perhaps this should be first on the list, as the surest way for the Wiki to grow is for each of us to contribute to this Wiki - and to invite friends and colleagues - including those who have not yet discovered the joys of Wiki work - to join in the process. Remember, as noted in the book, the power of a network is a function of the square of the number of nodes.

===Use of Wiki Features===

: There are many different ways to participate in a Wiki space. Become familiar with the different types of Wiki pages and find those areas in which you are most comfortable participating.

====Community portal====

: Contribute your thoughts, ideas and observations on this evolving Wiki community on the [[WikiNotes:Community Portal|Community portal]] page.

: Share some information about the networked information communities with which you are involved

====Discussion pages====

: If you want to respond to any of the pages in this Wiki, you can click on the ''Discussion'' link for the page.

====User pages====

: Edit your own ''User page'', and tell the Wealth of Network community something about who you are, your experiences in a networked information economy / society, and why you are participating in this Wiki.

====User talk pages====

: When you notice a contribution of particular interest, you may want to make a comment on the contribution in the contributor's User Talk page

====Help====

:* If you are an experienced Wiki worker. please help develop the [[Help:Contents|Help]] page

:* If you are in need of help on how to use this Wiki space, add your request for help or question(s), under the Frequently asked questions section of the Help page

==Wiki cross-pollination==

: '''Cross-posting with other Wiki spaces'''

:* '''Yale Access to Knowledge Conference''' [http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki/index.php/Main_Page]

:* '''The Wealth of Networks''' @ Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks]

:* '''[http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/index.php/Category:C2_workshop C2 workshop].''' Command and Control (C2) may seem like a narrow (and exclusively military) niche. The upcoming workshop understands C2 more broadly as referring to '''"the structures and processes though which an entity (i.e., a system, an organization, a community, a group, an organism, etc.) operates."''' As such C2 is concerned with the three poles of organization, [http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/index.php/Hierarchy,_autonomy,_and_community '''hierarchy, autonomy, and community''']. We welcome and encourage participation by members of this community.

: Please add links to other related Wiki spaces

==Spread the word==

===Blog this wiki===

: While Wiki space can be uniquely valuable in compiling and integrating a wealth of inormation, [[blogs]] tend to be among the most effective tools in spreading the word on key developments in cyberspace. Share your responses to The Wealth of Networks in your blog - and don't forget to include a link back to this site.

===Email lists===

: Email lists remain the simplest way to share information among friends and colleagues. Share information on The Wealth of Networks and this Wiki space with one or more of the email lists that you subscribe to.

==Watch this wiki grow==

: Revisit this wiki from time to time, and check on the [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent changes]] page to see which pages have been changed or added since you last visited.

==Be creative==

: Think outside the box of perspectives learned in an industrial, print-based information economy with an unsustainable - and devastating - appetite for trees, and enter into a universe in which knowledge is the source and currency of wealth, and can be freely shared and expressed.

: Re-read the Epigraph from [[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] for inspiration and to reflect on how the "inward forces' that guide you can best find expression here. Look to your Muses.

----

[[John Stuart Mill, On Liberty]] | [[Table of Contents]]
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Chapter 9, section 4

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Yochai: Reverted edit of TzeZ72, changed back to last version by Ptj

Talk:Ideas for how to help the wiki grow and be useful

2007-08-15T15:35:53Z

Yochai: spam

Chapter 2, section 1

2007-08-15T15:34:59Z

Yochai: Reverted edit of Jz6Ipt, changed back to last version by Ptj