Yochai Benkler on Open Source Economics

Yochai Benkler is a Harvard Law School scholar and eminent thinker on communications technology, social networks and economics. Here he is talking about legal ramifications of modern communications technology and ‘open source’ economics. Benkler's work provides several insights about the possibility of a more integral, flex-flow global social organization.

From TED.com:

Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they're paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.

Benkler writes about the Internet and the emergence of the networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications. In the 1990s he played a role in characterizing the centrality of information commons to innovation, information production, and freedom in both its autonomy and democracy senses. In the 2000s, he worked more on the sources and economic and political significance of radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture.

His work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors, and has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society. And his most recent book is The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006), which received numerous awards.

You can download the entire book, purchase it from Amazon, or download individual chapters: here