Coase's Penguin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, is an essay written in 2002 by Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law at the Yale University School of Law. Written for those "who study organizations or make intellectual property policy", it is a first attempt to explore how intellectual property law might be reconsidered in light of the emergence of "commons-based peer production", a new model of economic production.

"Commons-based peer production" is meant to describe a new model of economic production, different from both markets and firms, in which the creative energy of large numbers of people gets coordinated into large, meaningful projects, largely without financial compensation. All the examples mentioned are coordinated via the Internet; examples include Linux and Wikipedia.

The work is named after Ronald Coase who wrote the seminal 1937 work The Nature of the Firm that contrasted production via firms with production via markets; and Tux, Linux's penguin mascot, which symbolizes the most famous example of commons-based peer-production to date.

Benkler's ultimate thesis is that some of the restrictions that copyright and patent law place on the free flow of information are preventing commons-based peer-production from reaching its full potential. Since this is such an effective form of knowledge production, Benkler argues, it is worth reconsidering whether the costs really outweigh the benefits.

As it is written largely for the public policy community, Benkler's analysis proceeds in frameworks currently fashionable in that community, especially that of Transaction Cost Economics. He suggests that other, perhaps more sociological, analyses may also be insightful, though he does not pursue them himself.

In his discussion of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Benkler makes particular note of the neutral point of view ethic: "Perhaps the most interesting characteristic about Wikipedia is the self-conscious social-norm-based dedication to objective writing." Note that several peer-production projects he mentions have more formal accreditation processes than Wikipedia; Linux has a relatively formal hierarchy to review new submissions to the kernel, for example, and NASA's Clickworkers project has participants do redundant work, so that careless or malicious work can be eliminated through statistical averaging.

[edit] Citation

Yochai Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale Law Journal (2002-03) available at: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html