Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, April 15, 2006

Yochai Benkler's new book on commons-based information production

Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, 2006. Benkler has also provided an OA edition of the full text and a wiki to supplement it. (Thanks to the CC blog.) Excerpt:
At the same time, we are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based practices as a modality of information production and exchange. Free software, Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, the new guidelines of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on free publication of papers, new open archiving practices, librarian movements, and many other communities of practice are developing what was a contingent fact into a self-conscious social movement. As the domain of existing information and culture comes to be occupied by information and knowledge produced within these free sharing movements and licensed on the model of open-licensing techniques, the problem of the conflict with the proprietary domain will recede. Twentieth-century materials will continue to be a point of friction, but a sufficient quotient of twenty- first-century materials seem now to be increasingly available from sources that are happy to share them with future users and creators. If this socialcultural trend continues over time, access to content resources will present an ever-lower barrier to nonmarket production....

Bits are a part of a flow in the networked information environment, and trying to legislate that fact away in order to preserve a business model that sells particular collections of bits as discrete, finished goods may simply prove to be impossible....globe. The rise of commons-based information production, of individuals and loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms, presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, and great uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-based enterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenon—IBM’s adoption of open source, Second Life’s adoption of user-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source Technology Group’s development of a platform for Slashdot. We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, like injecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedly not in the book....We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the twenty- first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.

Update. Here's Lawrence Lessig's short, strong review: "Yochai Benkler’s book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is - by far - the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.  Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues - on either side of these debates - unless you have read this book."