The Wealth of Networks

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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by law professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006.

Summary:

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

Chapter 1 sets the stage for the entirety of Benkler’s argument as he calls forth the “emergence of a new stage in the information economy, the wealth of networks.” He establishes three observations about the emerging information production system. 1) Non-proprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of products, even when economics suggested that industrial models would thrive 2) There has been a rise of importance within nonmarket production 3) There has been a rise of importance within peer production of information, knowledge, and culture (just like wikipedia)

The result of these three observations is that individuals can now do alot more as social beings rather than as market actors through the price system. According to Benkler, this shift in networked information results in several changes within democratic societies. These include: 1) Enhanced Autonomy a) improves the capacity for people to do more for themselves b) enhances ones capacity do do more in loose commonality with others and without being constrained to market economic system c) improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate alongside the market sphere 2) The Networked Public Sphere: a) According to Benkler this will enable a shift from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere where 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 and opposing view. 3) Justice and Human Development: a) Benkler proposes that free access to information will improve the equality of opportunity for those who are the worst off 4) A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations: a) makes culture for more transparent b) makes culture more malleable Benkler makes the argument that this new mode of communication not only allows us to keep close familial ties, but also allows increased contact with those who are more diverse from us and with whom we would not stay in touch with if we didn’t have this mode of communication.

FOUR METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTS: Benkler goes on to make reference to four methods which he relies on throughout his thesis. 1) He assigns a significant value to the role of technology. 2) He offers an explanation centered on social relations but operating in the domain of economics rather than sociology. 3) He is offering a liberal political theory but taking a path that has usually been resisted in that literature. 4) His approach emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations.

ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS: Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. Benkler’s book will explore exactly how this effects human affairs.

ROLE OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM: For Benkler, the 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.

ECONOMIC STRUCTURE IN LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY: 1)Benkler is first concerned with human beings, with individuals, as the bearers of moral claims regarding the structure of the political and economic systems they inhabit. 2) Concerned with human beings in historical settings, not with representations of human beings abstracted from their settings. He treats property and markets as just one domain of human action, with affordances and limitations.

WHITHER THE STATE? Benkler puts forth that the state has played a role in supporting the market based industrial incumbents of the 20th century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the merging networked information economy. Benkler says that the liberal, democratic state will not fall apart but rather be strengthened by the model that he puts forth as the freedom of action for individuals, both alone and in loose cooperation with others, can achieve much of the liberal desiderata that he puts forth throughout the book. Globally, this will also increase the freedom of individuals in nonliberal states.

THE STAKES OF IT ALL: THE BATTLE OVER THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY OF THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT: Benkler feels that the single most threatening development at the physical layer has been an effort 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. He feels that if copyright claims are not enforced at this level, after a period of instability a new and better alignment will develop.

PART ONE: THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY: The Internet is the first mode of communication that expands its reach by DECENTRALIZING the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture and knowledge. This started off within the industrial information economy. Take for example, the music industry which produced records in order to sell their music. Both the capacity to make meaning and the capacity to communicate ones meaning around the world are held by millions of internet users around the world. Part 1 of the book is dedicated to explaining the technological, economic transformation that is making these practices possible.

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

Benkler begins this chapter by stating that information is typically considered a public good. Information is nonrival in that its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another.

The reason why information has not pervaded the world for free is because of economic incentives. In other words, people will not produce new information if they know that their products will be available for anyone to take for free. However, Benkler challenges this assumption and says that is only correct to the extent that it accurately describes the motivations of information producers.

Another quirky aspect of information that makes it difficult to classify economically is that today’s users of information are not only today’s readers and consumers: they are tomorrow’s innovators. A recent study finds that when a country makes a policy change increasing the patent law, research and development slightly decreases because current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own contributions.

Benkler then examines where incentive stems: 1) nonmarket sources; both state and nonstate 2) market actors whose business models do not depend on the regulatory framework of intellectual property Benkler then goes on to give an example of an industry that one normally considers copyright dependent, but in reality really isn’t: newspapers. Daily newspapers couldn’t survive if they just waited for one another to print stories and then copied one another. Benkler also establishes the fact that their revenue stems mostly from advertisements, and not what the reader pays for the actual newspaper. Therefore Benkler states that this industry, which is supposedly protected by copyrights, would go on performing just as well without copyrighted protection.

THE DIVERSITY OF STRATEGIES IN OUR CURRENT INFORMATION PRODUCTION SYSTEM: In this section Benkler goes through the many nonexclusive strategies for benefit maximization which can be pursued by both market and nonmarket actors. An ideal way of conceptualizing the copyright strategy can be referred to as the “Romantic Maximizer”. This conceives of the information producer as a single author or inventor laboring creatively but in expectation of royalties. However, the Romantic Maximizer is rarely the case and Benkler goes on to establish several other paths that are taken such as the “Mickey” in which a larger firm already owns and inventory of exclusive rights, through both in house development as well as by buying from Romantic Maximizers. He also discusses something he calls “RCA” a barter among the owners of inventories. He also goes on to make an example of IBM which has combined both supply and demand side economic strategies to adopt a nonproprietary business model which has proven to be successful. It invested more than a billion dollars in free software developers in order to provide it with a better operating system. The point of this section is to prove that there are many ways of producing knowledge and information in today’s society.

THE EFFECTS OF EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS: Strong intellectual property rights result in a new form of inefficiency. If these are disable, then there will be many more niche markets as a result of the internet. Strong exclusive rights will only increase the attractiveness of exclusive rights-based strategies at the expense of nonproprietary strategies, whether market-based or nonmarket based.

STRONG EXCLUSION RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT: 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, which in turn can improve freedom and justice in liberal societies.

Chapter 3: Peer Production and Sharing:'

Benkler begins this chapter by stating that according to the late twentieth-century American, it should not be the case that thousands of volunteers will come together to collaborate on a complex economic project. This, however, is exactly what is occurring without the presence of a price or even a future monetary return. Benkler attributes this to something referred to as commons based peer production. The emergence of free software suggests that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production in a radically decentralized, collaborative and nonproprietary way, The market has been run based on two concepts in the past: 1) Centralization: the response to the problem of how to make the behavior of many individual agents cohere into an effective pattern or achieve an effective result 2) Decentralization: the conditions under which the actions of many agents cohere and are effective despite the fact that they do not rely on reducing the number of people whose will counts to direct effective action Benkler suggests, that what we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.

FREE/OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE: In free open-source software participants retain copyrights in their contribution but they license then to anyone/everyone. What is not a booming trade began as the brainchild of a couple of people. The first of these was a one Mr. Stallman of MIT who wanted a world in which software enabled people to use information freely, where no one would have to ask permission to change the software they use to fit their needs to to share it with a friend for whom it would be helpful. From this stemmed the GNU or General Public License. This license allows anyone to contribute to the GNU project without worrying that one day they will wake up and find that someone has locked them out of the system that they helped build.

PEER PRODUCTION OF INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND CULTURE GENERALLY: The older form of media, such as a major news station was able to produce the utterance, give it credibility and clearing and then distribute it all simultaneously. The internet disaggregates many of these tasks.

UTTERING CONTENT: With the internet, the task of sifting and accrediting falls to the user, motivated by the need to find an answer to the question posed. Wikipedia, was founded by Jimmy Wales and used three factors to make it successful. 1) It uses a collaborative authorship tool, the Wiki which allows anyone to edit and store all the different versions. 2) It is a self conscious effort at creating an encyclopedia governed first and foremost by a collective informal undertaking to strive for a neutral point of view within the limits of substantial self-awareness as to the difficulties of such an enterprise. 3) All content generated by this collaboration is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Benkler goes on to state that this combination of an explicit statement of common purpose, transparency, and the ability of participants to identify each other’s actions and counteract the - that is, edit out the ‘bad’ definitions - seems to have succeeded in keeping this community from devolving into inefficacy or worse.

RELEVANCE/ACCREDITATION: In the world of the Internet, relevance and accreditation usually falls to a peer produced rating system. This is best exemplified by google. The engine treats links from other websites pointing to a given website as votes of confidence. Whenever someone who authors a website links it to someone else’s page, that person has stated quite explicitly that the linked page is worth a visit. According to Benkler, the great thing about accreditation on the Internet is that there is a moderation setup designed to give many users a small amount of power.

VALUE-ADDED DISTRIBUTION: Benkler gives an example of this by talking about Project Gutenberg which scans in books to create an online library. They then distribute the proof reading which works much better than making one person responsible for an entire book. People are able to proof a few pages at a time, rather than being responsible for an entire book.

SHARING OF PROCESSING, STORAGE, AND COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORMS: There are also participants in this online collaboration who instead, share their material goods that they privately own, such as computer computation, storage, and communications capacity. An example of this is SETI@home. When a person signs up for this program, they allow their personal computer to be used while it is idle in order to perform calculations for a larger project. Benkler goes on to state that what is truly unique about peer to peer networks as a signal of what is to come is the fact that with ridiculously low financial investment, a few teenagers were able to write software and protocols that allowed tens of millions of computer users around the world to cooperate in producing the most efficient and robust fils storage and retrieval system in the world. When Benkler makes this statement it is in reference to peer to peer file sharing services such as Gnutella and KaZaa. The network component owned by any single music service cannot match the collective storage and retrieval capabilities of the universe of users’ hard drives and network connections. Benkler goes on to discuss other new developments in the internet world such as Skype, an internet telephone utility that allows owners of computers to have voice conversations with each other over the internet for free. It is important to understand that nonmarket production in general and peer production in particular are phenomena of much wider application than free software and exist in important ways throughout the networked information economy. Benkler goes on to discuss the other ways in which these unique aspects of the internet are used, and what is at risk with current/future law, later on in his book.

Chapter Four: The Economics of Social Production:

Benkler starts off this chapter by stating three questions that arise from an economic perspective when given the results discussed in the last chapter. 1) Why do people participate? 2) Why now and where here? 3) Is it efficient to have all of these people sharing their computers and donating all their time and creative effort? He answers this throughout the entire chapter, however begins with an overall encompassing answer stating “it is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations - through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action - that creates the opportunities for great autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community.”

MOTIVATION: Benkler states that we live our lives in diverse social frames ant that money has a complex relationship within these; sometimes it adds to the motivation and other times it detracts. Take for example an altruistic blood procurement system. This is considered both more ethical and more efficient than a market system. According to psychologist Edward Deci extrinsic motivations often times crowd out intrinsic motivation because they either impair self determination or they impair self esteem. Under some circumstances, adding money for an activity previously undertaken without price compensation reduces, rather than increases, the level of activity. Benkler proposes that these ideas regarding motivation should be superimposed upon the analysis of the last chapter.

SOCIAL PRODUCTION: FEASIBILITY CONDITIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL FORM: With the computer, individual users possess and control the physical capital necessary to make effective the human capacities they uniquely possess. The number of people who can participate in a project is inversely related to the size of the smallest contribution necessary to produce a usable module. Benkler defines modularity as a property of a project that describes the extent to which it ca be broken down into smaller components (modules) that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole. Thus, Benkler goes on to explain that the internet has allowed for a huge amount of participation due to the small size of each individual module.

TRANSACTION COSTS AND EFFICIENCY: Benkler goes on to state that the rest of the book will be dedicated to evaluating why and to what extent a commons based sector is desirable from perspectives of freedom and justice. It is sated that there ate two scare resources: 1) Human creativity, time and attention 2) The computation and communications resources used in information production and exchange

Benkler goes on to state that the current market based system is inefficient with the rigidities associated with collecting and comprehending bids from individuals through market systems. The system that emerges from the internet gets rid of these problems by comparison to a system in which, once an individual self-identifies for a task, he or she can then undertake it without permission, contract or instruction from another. The cost advantage of sharing as a transactional framework relative to the price system increases linearly with the number of transactions necessary to acquire the level of resources necessary for an operation. Benkler then applies this statement to some of the other modes of information resources mentioned in previous chapters such as SETI@home. It is better to allow people to share their computer space rather than pay them for it because in the right social context, fewer owners will be willing to sell their excess capacity cheaply than they will be willing to give it away for free. He also states that the transaction costs of selling would be higher than those of sharing.

THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION IN THE DIGITALLY NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT: This section begins with the question: Why do we, despite the ubiquity of social production, generally ignore it as an economic phenomenon and why might we now reconsider its importance? The answer to this question is that it isn’t always ignored. However when the use of larger scale physical capital goods is a threshold requirement of effective action, it is much more difficult to rely on decentralized sharing as a standard modality of production. However, this is about to change. Goods, services and resources that in the industrial stage of the information economy required large-scale concentrated capital in investment to provision, are now subject to computers and the internet that can make sharing a better way of achieving the same results than can states or markets.

THE RELATIVE ECONOMIC ROLE OF SHARING CHANGES WITH TECHNOLOGY: So where does all of this sharing come from? Has humanity changed its ways and now sees the light of being kind to one another? Benkler does not propose this, but rather puts forth the idea that technology does not determine the level of sharing but rather sets the threshold constraints on the effective domain of sharing as a modality of economic production.

THE INTERFACE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION AND MARKET-BASED BUSINESSES: Benkler states that as this new commons-based means of production comes about, the former industrial market world can merge with it. A manager 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. In this way, large scale enterprises like Wikipedia can begin to form and thrive.

Chapter 8: Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical:

How culture is produced is an essential ingredient in structuring how freedom and justice are perceived, conceived, and pursued. We are now seeing the possibility of an emergence of a new popular culture produced on the folk-culture model and inhabited actively, rather than passively, by the masses. Benkler begins this chapter by making three major statements.

1) Claims that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject for normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory. 2) Cultural production in the form of the networked information economy offers individuals a greater participatory role in making the culture they occupy and makes the culture more transparent to its inhabitants. 3) The kind of open participatory transparent folk culture that is emerging in the networked environment is normatively more attractive than was the industrial cultural production system that was typified by Hollywood and the recording industry.

CULTURAL FREEDOM IN LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY: In today’s world culture has been incorporated into political theory as the central part of the critique of liberalism. For example, it is difficult to defend respect for autonomous choices as a respect for an individual’s will when an objective observer is able to point to a social process (such as culture acclimation) acting upon the individual and causing that individual to hold that particular will. In liberal democracy there is a need for some cultural coherence. Benkler sees this as a precondition to becoming liberal citizens. It allows one to talk and defend their claim in terms without which there can be no liberal conversation. What is great about the internet is that it has a large capability of calling into question background knowledge, at which point it no longer is background knowledge. Background knowledge is defied as knowledge we make use of without awareness of the fact that it could be false. When it becomes challenged then it disintegrates into background modality. In this sense, culture is revisable through critical examination.

THE TRANSPARENCY OF INTERNET CULTURE: Benkler begins with a description of Google to prove his point regarding transparency. Google uses a radically decentralized mechanism for assigning relevance. A google search of Barbie is given as an example of the transparency that results from the decentralized mechanism of relevance. A google search of Barbie results in several widely varied sites. The official site comes up, along with sites regarding the feminist perspective of Barbie’s as well as a site called “suicide bomber Barbie”. All of these sites reflect different ideas, from political to gender studies, to the typical commercial ideas. Benkler suggests that the transparency does not force the little girl who is looking up Barbie to choose one meaning or the other. However, it does render transparent that Barbie can have multiple meanings and that choosing that meaning can be important matter of political concern for some people. The idea of Barbie is then extended into encyclopedia analysis by comparing the wikipedia entry to that of the Britannica entry. The wikipedia entry shows how the entry altered over time. The software allows any reader to look at prior versions of the definition, to compare specific versions, and to read the ‘talk’ pages - the pages where the participants discuss their definition and their thoughts about it. The Britannica entry on the other hand is one experts idea about what Barbie is, and is very straightforward. The wikipedia entry is a more eclectic compilation of all the different perspectives that people now take on Barbie and how that idea has evolved over time.

People engage in conversations with each other precisely to understand themselves in the world, their relationship to others and what makes them like and unlike those others. There is a clear distinction between market and nonmarket-based activities. Britannica has built its reputation on delivery of the knowledge and opinions of those in positions to claim authority in the name of culture and competence. This nonmarket wikipedia will not displace the encyclopedia market, according to Benkler, but rather present an alternative path for cultural conversation. This cultural conversation, by it’s very nature, increases the transparency of culture to its inhabitants.

The wikipedia example makes clear two important concepts: 1) The degree of self consciousness that is feasible with open conversation of culture 2) The degree to which the culture is writable and to which individuals can participate in mixing and matching and making their own emphases for themselves and for others on a set of existing symbols This potential of the emerging openness of the internet has been referred to by some as semiotic democracy.

THE PLASTICITY OF INTERNET CULTURE: THE FUTURE OF HIGH PRODUCTION VALUE FOLK CULTURE: There are now new programs that make it much easier for people to participate in the process of making music, videos and art. Benkler concedes that not everyone is a Mel Gibson or a Frank Sinatra. However, he goes on to state that the practice of making cultural artifacts of all forms enables individuals in a society to be better readers, listeners, and viewers of professionally produced culture as well as contributors of our own statements into this mix of collective culture.

A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: TOWARD POLICY: Benkler goes on to state two distinctive forms of purpose in regards to culture: 1) A concern for the degree of freedom individuals have to form and pursue a life plan and the degree of participation they can exercise in debating and determining collective action 2) The relative attractiveness of the 20th century industrial model of cultural production and what appears to be emerging as the networked model in the early 21st century rather than on the relationship of the latter to some theoretically defined culture Understanding cultural framework:

Benkler suggests that there are four aspects to this: 1) Participation in cultural discourse is intimately tied to individual self-expression. 2) Culture is more intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life tan political process and debates 3) Culture infuses thoughts at a wide level of consciousness 4) There is no point outside of culture in which we stand and decide

Benkler does not suggest that we want a bunch of people floating around disconnected from a culture. Rather, the ability to exchange ideas and adopt that which we find enabling does seem a good prospective to him.

Chapter 9: Justice and Development:

Access to knowledge has become central to human development. With the internet and networked information economy, there is an opportunity like never before for improvement in the normative domain of justice as compared to what was possible with the industrial information economy. The networked information economy reduces both cost barriers and transactional barriers creating alternative paths. Benkler goes one step further than just making these observations, but goes on to state that a system that relies too heavily on proprietary approaches to information production is not just inefficient, but unjust.

LIBERAL THEORIES OF JUSTICE AND THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY: Benkler argues that the networked information economy improves justice from the perspective of every single justice theory. Benkler brings back his encyclopedia analysis saying that there is no loss in social surplus when non-market entities enter into something where the industrial market has been established AND that this social surplus is distributed more equally so that it helps the poor. This equality of opportunity to act in the face of unequal endowment is something that Benkler feels is central to all liberal theories of justice.

COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR HUMAN WELFARE AND DEVELOPMENT: Education is heavily dependent on access to materials and facilities for teaching. Economic growth has been understood to be centrally driven by innovation. Benkler states that the emergence of the networked information economy will feed both of these ideas making it possible for those not as well off to achieve the basic tools necessary to succeed.

INFORMATION EMBEDDED GOOS AND TOOLS, INFORMATION, AND KNOWLEDGE: Information embedded goods are now becoming more plentiful/cheaper because of some technological advance embedded in them/associated with their production. Free software also solves the problem of piracy of software. Information embedded tools: innovation is encumbered more than it is encouraged when the basic tools for innovation are proprietary. This property system gives owners of these tools proprietary rights to control innovation that relies on their tools. Information: Information is usually used to refer to a raw set of data, scientific reports, news, and factual reports. Knowledge: Knowledge is a set of cultural practices and capacities necessary for processing the information into either new statements in the information exchange, or more important in this context, for practical use of the information in appropriate ways to produce more desirable actions or outcomes from action.

The transfer of knowledge consists of two things: 1) The transfer of implicit knowledge, which resists codification into what would be here treated as information, such as training manuals 2) The transfer of formal instruction in an educational context (such as the MIT Open Courseware Initiative)

INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF HDA-RELATED INFORMATION INDUSTRIES: Benkler states that software is particularly well suited to having a greater role for commons based production. Exclusive proprietary producers now account for only one third of software related revenues within each market.

TOWARD ADOPTING COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: Major world-improvement organizations such as the WTO and TRIPS think that strong protection is good, stronger protection better. Benkler states that the idea of international intellectual property is making it very difficult to reverse the trend toward increasing exclusive property right protections and thus making it impossible to take advantage of the new perhaps more just ways of producing things using the internet and the networked information economy. Despite these high intellectual property laws, Benkler proposes that commons based strategies can be implemented without changes in law. Some of these solutions are commons based and others are peer production solutions.

SOFTWARE: The baseline for Benkler’s point is software because it has already been proven to be quite successful with peer production systems. He says that free software can play two significant roles for developing nations. 1) It offers low cost access to high performing software for developing nations 2) There is the potential for participation in software markets based on human ability even without access to a stock of exclusive rights in existing software.

SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION: Benkler states that the beginning of a nonproprietary strategy for scientific publication is beginning to emerge. There are different approaches from which this can occur. The first approach involves authoring and peer review with no expectation of pay and a salaried editorial staff. This is seen in organizations such as the Public Library of Science which derives its revenue from author payments, university memberships and philanthropic support. Another approach is for authors to collaborate and put their works up on websites dedicated to scientific works, such as ArXiv.org. This based on a peer review system of user comments. There is a small number of potential readers for such websites, but these readers have a high capacity to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. There have been attempts to make scientific text books, however these have mainly failed. The main constraint on this is the compilation requirements which constricts the modularity that these text-authoring projects adopt. The MIT open source initiative has been the most highly successful of these type of educational online attempts. They give anyone access to the teaching materials of some of the best minds in the world.

COMMONS-BASED RESEARCH FOR FOOD AND MEDICINES: Agriculture offers more immediate opportunities for improvement than does medicine because of the relatively larger role of public research which extends from national, international to academic. Developments such as crop improvement associations, seed certification improvements, and open-release policies that allow anyone to breed and sell certified seeds have allowed farmers to have access to the fruits of public research in a reasonably efficient way. An example of a success of things of this nature is the hybrid corn. What can be done to employ a commons based strategy to provide a foundation for research that will be focused on the food security of developing world populations? Alongside the national efforts that many are taking, there are two major paths:

1) Base it on existing institutes and programs that are cooperating to build a commons-based system, cleared of the barriers of patents and breeders rights 2) Base it on the kind of loose affiliation of university scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals

The Public Intellectual Property Right for Agriculture was founded on the idea that some people, such as university scientists, are not driven by a profit motive, and so it allows them to collaborate. However, when they did discover helpful things, such as rice that implements vitamin A supplements, it was found that it had already been patented in over 60 countries.

The Generation Challenge Program is attempting to develop Web-based interfaces that share their data and computational resources. Another program that is attempting to create a commons-based program s called BIOS. BIOS is based on the idea that much of contemporary agricultural research depends on access to tools and enabling technologies. An example of this would be mechanisms to identify genes or for transferring them into target plants. In very simplistic terms, this means that anyone who builds upon the contributions of other must contribute improvements back to all of the other participants in the program. This allows for for information to be transferred into other areas of innovation at the very heart of what makes for human ability such as the ability for all to feed themselves. These ideas challenge the conventional wisdom that ever increasing intellectual property rights are necessary to secure greater investment in research.

ACCESS TO MEDICINES: COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH: Death is increasingly becoming a consequence of poverty. Benkler state that if there is immorality to be found then it is in the legal and policy system that relies heavily on the patent system to induce drug discovery and development and then does not fund adequately the biomedical research to solve problems that cannot be solved by relying solely on market pull, such as illnesses that only afflict third world countries and promise no economic return. Universities have two complementary paths: 1) Leveraging existing university patent portfolios 2) Constructing collaboration platforms to allow scientists to engage in peer production, cross cutting the traditional grant-funded lab, and aiming toward research into diseases that do not exercise a market pull on the biomedical research system

Leveraging University Patents: Benkler uses an example from Yale University which a company in India took a patent of a medicine created at yale and made it alot cheaper to produce so that it would actually be plausible to distribute to people who really needed the medication. There are complex problems that remain even if universities made the change. If an institutional interface between universities and the pharmaceutical industry was designed that would provide sustainable benefits for the developing world distribution of drugs and for research opportunities into developing world diseases. There are two barriers to this. 1) Distribution 2) Research that requires access to tools Benkler suggests that in exchange for access to university patents, the pharmaceutical licenses can agree not to assert any of their own rights in drugs that require a university license against generics manufacturers who make generic versions of those drugs purely for distribution in low and middle income countries. This won’t solve all of the problems (such as delivery) but it could help alot in his argument and be better than it is at the current moment.

NONPROFIT RESEARCH: Things like the Bill Gates independent research foundation are what Benkler suggests. However, this model is new and has not yet had enough time to mature and provide measurable success.

PEER PRODUCTION OF DRUG RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: While it may be difficult to and too expensive to have a big revolution on the peer production scale in regards to medicine, this may prove to be wrong with developing technologies. An example of this would be the increasing portions of biomedical research that are done through modeling, computer simulation and data analysis. The best current example of this working is bioinformatics, a movement aimed at developing the tools in an open-source model, and in providing access to these tools and the outputs on a free and open basis. A more complex problem is building wet-lab science on a peer production basis. Access to laboratories is limited. However, Benkler goes on to state that there are machines that are redundantly provisioned in laboratories and thus have downtime. There are also postdoctoral fellows in labs with downtime. If these groups of people are given an internet basis upon which to collaborate with new information, great things could happen.

COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: CONCLUSION: When individuals are allowed to collaborate freely, free from the constraints of proprietary endowment, there is a flourishing of individual action and informal association which can emerge as a new global mover. This allows for people to act in response to all of their motivations. This offers a new path, alongside that of the formal market, for achieving definable and significant improvements in human development throughout the world. This, says Benkler, is where freedom and justice coincide.

Chapter 12: Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy:

This chapter starts with a recapitulation of the thesis presented at the beginning of the book. Benkler states that due to the extreme fear of communism and a need for countries to distinguish themselves from that ideology, policy makers and their advisers came to believe that property in information and innovation was like property in wristwatches and automobiles.

Benkler feels that he has demonstrated throughout the book that patents on information impedes democratic societies and is unjust for the world as a whole. As technology has increased and processing, storage and information has become easier to maintain, non-proprietary models have become even more attractive and effective. New organizations that rely on peer production are proving that these theories can work in reality. In contrast to the communist theory, this networked information economy has actually increased individual autonomy, allowing people not only to perceive the world around them but to alter the perception of that world. The views of more individuals and communities can now be heard with the rise of internet technologies. In contrast to the critiques that the Internet would increase information overload and fragmentation, the Internet has proven to be a unique and wonderful combination of self-conscious peer-production efforts and emergent properties of large systems of human beings. Given the freedom to participate in making our own information environment, people are able to to avoid the Babel problem while concurrently not replicating the hierarchies of mass-mediated public spheres.

The Internet also allows people not only to ‘occupy’ culture but also to interpret our culture as it becomes more transparent and thus contribute to that culture a unique interpretation.

The sky is the limit with this new mode of information creation and communication. Justice throughout the world can be served as more and more people have equal access to information, knowledge, education, and medicine. However, if patents continue to maintain their steady role over society, a problem can and will develop and the freedom that the Internet could contribute to the world will be contained. With this new Internet will come an upset. It will result in redistribution of wealth and power. This upset has resulted in and will result in battles over the organization and legal capabilities of the physical components of the digitally networked environment. In regards to open-source development, both the law and society have been fairly open to allowing this to flourish. An example of this would be the open-source software. However, on the content layer, in regards to the universe of existing information, knowledge, and culture, there is a counter-force between the law and the culture of society. As the law tightens the control of exclusive rights, social trends push towards a networked information economy in which knowledge, information, and art is all shared.

One problem with the legal and political society that is developing is the pressures upon these facets of government to maintain proprietary business. Benkler states that it is hard to predict whether a successful sustained effort on the part of the industrial information economy producers will succeed in flipping those in favor of proprietary production. It is, however, beginning to become a significant social movement. The idea of a networked-information economy brings with it great promise but also great uncertainty. It has been seen in the software mode and in peer to peer file sharing, that such systems can exist in reality. However, there are other forces at work here too, such as businesses who inject corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks in order to discourage use, or the laws and regulations that are beginning to crack down on such emerging information production.

Benkler concludes his book with a statement of the utmost hope for the proliferation of democracy and freedom. By removing some of the transactional barriers to material opportunity, the state of human development can improve everywhere. A networked information economy contains within it the potential for better human welfare, development, and freedom.

A complete PDF of the book is freely downloadable on the wiki of the book and is available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license.