Browsing by Author "Benkler, Yochai"

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Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm
(2002) Benkler, Yochai
From Introduction: "The emergence of free software and the phenomenal success of its flagships - the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache web server, Perl, sendmail, BIND - and many other projects should force us to take a second look at the dominant paradigm we hold about productivity. In the late 1930s, Ronald Coase wrote The Nature of the Firm, in which he explained why firms emerge, defining firms as clusters of resources and agents that interact through managerial command systems rather than markets. In that paper, Coase introduced the concept of transaction costs, which are costs associated with defining and enforcing property and contract rights and which are a necessary incident of organizing any activity on a market model. Coase explained the emergence and limits of firms based on the differences in the transaction costs associated with organizing production through markets or through firms. People use markets when the gains from doing so, net of transaction costs, exceed the gains from doing the same thing in a managed firm, net of organization costs. Firms emerge when the opposite is true. Any individual firm will stop growing when its organization costs exceed the organization costs of a smaller firm. "The emergence of free software as a substantial force in the software development world poses a puzzle for this organization theory. Free software projects do not rely either on markets or on managerial hierarchies to organize production. Programmers do not generally participate in a project because someone who is their boss instructed them, though some do. They do not generally participate in a project because someone offers them a price, though some participants do focus on long-term appropriation through money-oriented activities, like consulting or service contracts. But the critical mass of participation in projects cannot be explained by the direct presence of a command, a price, or even a future monetary return, particularly in the all-important microlevel decisions regarding selection of projects to which participants contribute. In other words, programmers participate in free software projects without following the normal signals generated by market-based, firm-based, or hybrid models. "In this Article, I approach this puzzle by departing from free software. Rather than trying to explain what is special about software or hackers, I generalize from the phenomenon of free software to suggest characteristics that make large-scale collaborations in many information production fields sustainable and productive in the digitally networked environment without reliance either on markets or managerial hierarchy. Hence the title of this Article - to invoke the challenge that the paunchy penguin mascot of the Linux kernel development community poses for the view of organization rooted in Coase's work."
The Commons as a Neglected Factor of Information Policy
(1998) Benkler, Yochai
"Direct government intervention and privatization have long been the dominant institutional approaches to implementing information policy. Policies pursued using these approaches have tended to result in a centralized information production and exchange system. The paper suggests that adding a third cluster of institutional devices, commons, may be a more effective approach to decentralizing information production. The paper uses two examples, from spectrum regulation and intellectual property, to show that regulating certain resources as commons is feasible, and that such commons can cause organizations and individuals who use these resources to organize the way they produce information in a decentralized pattern. The paper suggests that identifying additional resources capable of being used as commons, and investing in the institutional design necessary to maintain stable commons in these resources, serves two constitutional commitments. First, commons are the preferred approach to serving the commitment that government not unnecessarily prevent individuals from using or communicating information. Second, commons facilitate the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources."
Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information
(2003) Benkler, Yochai
"In this Lecture, I want to outline two fundamental social aspects of the emerging economic-technological condition of the networked information economy: the economic concerned with the organization of production and consumption in this economy, and the political concerned with how we pursue autonomy, democracy, and social justice in this new condition. We have seen over the past few years glimpses of this emerging economy and of its emerging political implications. We have seen the surprising growth of free software, an oasis of anarchistic production that is beating some of the world s richest corporations at their own game making reliable high-quality software. We have seen a Russian computer programmer jailed for weeks in the United States pending indictment for writing software that lets Americans read books that they are not allowed to read. These and many other stories sprinkled throughout the pages of the technology sections of our daily newspapers hint at a deep transformation that is taking place, and at an epic battle over how this transformation shall go and who will come out on top when the dust settles."
Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment
(1998) Benkler, Yochai
"We are in the process today of making a fundamental choice about how we will communicate with each other in the next century. We are making this choice without debating it. In fact, we are talking about the wrong thing, at the wrong time, and making this choice (which may be right) for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all. The decision to be made is deceptively technical: how to regulate that part of the digitally networked environment that utilizes wireless or radio-communications technology. The current legal framework for radio transmission relies on administrative licensing of broadcasters. The emerging regulatory alternative replaces licensing with an exhaustive system of property rights in the radio frequency spectrum. This article analyzes a third alternative: regulating wireless transmissions as a public commons, as we today regulate our highway system and our computer networks. The choice we make among these alternatives will determine the path of development of our wireless communications infrastructure. Its social, political, and cultural implications are likely to be profound."
Property, Commons, and the First Amendment: Towards a Core Common Infrastructure
(2001) Benkler, Yochai
"Over the past 150 years the cost of effective communications media has increased dramatically. As transportation improved and political units and social interdependence expanded geographically, the relevant political and cultural communities for most people expanded. Reaching these expanded communities was made possible through the introduction of mass media first high-volume mechanical presses, then film, radio, and television. Throughout this period the high costs of the means of effective speech have increased the concentration of media, and largely focused its owners on serving the monetizable consumption habits of ever-larger audiences."
Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain
(2003) Benkler, Yochai
From Introduction: "This paper does three things. First, it outlines the general framework of the relationship between two constitutional provisions -- Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 and the First Amendment -- and Congress's power to regulate the use of information and cultural resources through the institutional form of exclusive private rights. Second, this paper explains why it is appropriate, as a normative matter, to require close judicial scrutiny of congressional use of this particular form of regulation. Third, it identifies six specific pressure points currently bearing on this framework."
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
(Yale University Press, 2006) Benkler, Yochai
"A ground-breaking book on the transformative opportunities associated with the evolution of networked social production. The Wealth of Networks was hailed by Lawrence Lessig as the most important book of 2006. In keeping with the subject, Professor Benkler has released The Wealth of Networks under a Creative Commons BY-NC license."