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diff --git a/data/v2/samples/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst b/data/v2/samples/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst index e6ff933..200fb92 100644 --- a/data/v2/samples/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst +++ b/data/v2/samples/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst @@ -34,14 +34,14 @@ @make: :skin: skin_won_benkler - :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :breaks: new=:B; break=1 @links: {The Wealth of Networks, dedicated wiki}http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page {Yochai Benkler, wiki}http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page {The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler - {tWoN book index @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.book_index.yochai_benkler/doc.html {@ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks + {Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel {Two Bits, Christopher Kelty @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/two_bits.christopher_kelty {Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig {CONTENT, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/content.cory_doctorow @@ -231,7 +231,7 @@ Social and economic organization is not infinitely malleable. Neither is it alwa This book is offered, then, as a challenge to contemporary liberal democracies. We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new environment will in some significant measure depend on policy choices that we make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice--a choice about how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and ,{[pg 28]}, economic conditions. As economic policy, allowing yesterday's winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow's economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom, and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable. ,{[pg 29]}, -:C~ Part One - The Networked Information Economy +:B~ Part One - The Networked Information Economy 1~p1 Introduction ={communities:technology-defined social structure+9;norms (social):technology-defined structure+9;regulation by social norms: technology-defined structure+9;social relations and norms: technology-defined structure+9;social structure, defined by technology+9;technology:social structure defined by+9} @@ -294,6 +294,8 @@ The actual universe of information production in the economy then, is not as dep The ideal-type strategy that underlies patents and copyrights can be thought of as the "Romantic Maximizer." It conceives of the information producer as a single author or inventor laboring creatively--hence romantic--but in expectation of royalties, rather than immortality, beauty, or truth. An individual or small start-up firm that sells software it developed to a larger firm, or an author selling rights to a book or a film typify this model. The second ideal type that arises within exclusive-rights based industries, "Mickey," is a larger firm that already owns an inventory of exclusive rights, some through in-house development, some by buying from Romantic Maximizers. ,{[pg 43]}, ={Mickey model+3;Romantic Maximizer model+2} +<:pb> + !_ Table 2.1: Ideal-Type Information Production Strategies ={demand-side effects of information production;Joe Einstein model+1;learning networks+1;limited sharing networks+1;Los Alamos model+1;nonmarket information producers:strategies for information production+1;RCA strategy+1;Scholarly Lawyers model+1;sharing:limited sharing networks} @@ -624,7 +626,7 @@ The independence of Web sites is what marks their major difference from more org ={Slashdot+1;accreditation:Slashdot+1;filtering:Slashdot+1;relevance filtering:Slashdot+1;peer production:maintenance of cooperation+1;structured production:maintenance of cooperation+1} Cooperation in peer-production processes is usually maintained by some combination of technical architecture, social norms, legal rules, and a technically backed hierarchy that is validated by social norms. /{Wikipedia}/ is the strongest example of a discourse-centric model of cooperation based on social norms. However, even /{Wikipedia}/ includes, ultimately, a small number of people with system administrator privileges who can eliminate accounts or block users in the event that someone is being genuinely obstructionist. This technical fallback, however, appears only after substantial play has been given to self-policing by participants, and to informal and quasi-formal communitybased dispute resolution mechanisms. Slashdot, by contrast, provides a strong model of a sophisticated technical system intended to assure that no one can "defect" from the cooperative enterprise of commenting and moderating comments. It limits behavior enabled by the system to avoid destructive behavior before it happens, rather than policing it after the fact. The Slash code does this by technically limiting the power any given person has to moderate anyone else up or down, and by making every moderator the subject of a peer review system whose judgments are enforced technically-- that is, when any given user is described by a sufficiently large number of other users as unfair, that user automatically loses the technical ability to moderate the comments of others. The system itself is a free software project, licensed under the GPL (General Public License)--which is itself the quintessential example of how law is used to prevent some types of defection from the common enterprise of peer production of software. The particular type of defection that the GPL protects against is appropriation of the joint product by any single individual or firm, the risk of which would make it less attractive for anyone to contribute to the project to begin with. The GPL assures that, as a legal matter, no one who contributes to a free software project need worry that some other contributor will take the project and make it exclusively their own. The ultimate quality judgments regarding what is incorporated into the "formal" releases of free software projects provide the clearest example of the extent to which a meritocratic hierarchy can be used to integrate diverse contributions into a finished single product. In the case of the Linux kernel development project (see chapter 3), it was always within the power of Linus Torvalds, who initiated the project, to decide which contributions should be included in a new release, and which should not. But it is a funny sort of hierarchy, whose quirkiness Steve Weber ,{[pg 105]}, well explicates.~{ Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). }~ Torvalds's authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to prevent them from developing anything they want and add it to their kernel, or to distribute that alternative version of the kernel. There is nothing he can do to prevent the entire community of users, or some subsection of it, from rejecting his judgment about what ought to be included in the kernel. Anyone is legally free to do as they please. So these projects are based on a hierarchy of meritocratic respect, on social norms, and, to a great extent, on the mutual recognition by most players in this game that it is to everybody's advantage to have someone overlay a peer review system with some leadership. -={Wikipedia project;Torvalds, Linus;Weber, Steve;General Public License (GPL):See also fre software;GPL (General Public License):See Also free software;licensing:GPL (General Public License)} +={Wikipedia project;Torvalds, Linus;Weber, Steve;General Public License (GPL):See also free software;GPL (General Public License):See Also free software;licensing:GPL (General Public License)} In combination then, three characteristics make possible the emergence of information production that is not based on exclusive proprietary claims, not aimed toward sales in a market for either motivation or information, and not organized around property and contract claims to form firms or market exchanges. First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies. Certainly, personal computers as capital goods are under the control of numbers of individuals that are orders of magnitude larger than the number of parties controlling the use of massproduction-capable printing presses, broadcast transmitters, satellites, or cable systems, record manufacturing and distribution chains, and film studios and distribution systems. This means that the physical machinery can be put in service and deployed in response to any one of the diverse motivations individual human beings experience. They need not be deployed in order to maximize returns on the financial capital, because financial capital need not be mobilized to acquire and put in service any of the large capital goods typical of the industrial information economy. Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the industrial economy, are public goods--existing information, knowledge, and culture. Their actual marginal social cost is zero. Unless regulatory policy makes them purposefully expensive in order to sustain the proprietary business models, acquiring raw materials also requires no financial capital outlay. Again, this means that these raw materials can be deployed for any human motivation. They need not maximize financial returns. Third, the technical architectures, organizational models, and social dynamics of information production and exchange on the Internet have developed so that they allow us to structure the solution to problems--in particular to information production problems--in ways ,{[pg 106]}, that are highly modular. This allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide range of reasons that, in combination, cohere into new useful information, knowledge, and cultural goods. These architectures and organizational models allow both independent creation that coexists and coheres into usable patterns, and interdependent cooperative enterprises in the form of peer-production processes. ={computers;hardware;personal computers;physical machinery and computers} @@ -798,7 +800,7 @@ The other quite basic change wrought by the emergence of social production, from The overarching point is that social production is reshaping the market conditions under which businesses operate. To some of the incumbents of the industrial information economy, the pressure from social production is experienced as pure threat. It is the clash between these incumbents and the new practices that was most widely reported in the media in the first five years of the twenty-first century, and that has driven much of policy making, legislation, and litigation in this area. But the much more fundamental effect on the business environment is that social production is changing the relationship of firms to individuals outside of them, and through this changing the strategies that firms internally are exploring. It is creating new sources of inputs, and new tastes and opportunities for outputs. Consumers are changing into users--more active and productive than the consumers of the ,{[pg 127]}, industrial information economy. The change is reshaping the relationships necessary for business success, requiring closer integration of users into the process of production, both in inputs and outputs. It requires different leadership talents and foci. By the time of this writing, in 2005, these new opportunities and adaptations have begun to be seized upon as strategic advantages by some of the most successful companies working around the Internet and information technology, and increasingly now around information and cultural production more generally. Eric von Hippel's work has shown how the model of user innovation has been integrated into the business model of innovative firms even in sectors far removed from either the network or from information production--like designing kite-surfing equipment or mountain bikes. As businesses begin to do this, the platforms and tools for collaboration improve, the opportunities and salience of social production increases, and the political economy begins to shift. And as these firms and social processes coevolve, the dynamic accommodation they are developing provides us with an image of what the future stable interface between market-based businesses and the newly salient social production is likely to look like. ,{[pg 128]}, ,{[pg 129]}, ={von Hippel, Eric} -:C~ Part Two - The Political Economy of Property and Commons +:B~ Part Two - The Political Economy of Property and Commons 1~p2 Introduction ={commons+5;property ownership+5} @@ -1568,6 +1570,8 @@ If culture is indeed part of how we form a shared sense of unexamined common kno If you run a search for "Barbie" on three separate search engines--Google, Overture, and Yahoo!--you will get quite different results. Table 8.1 lists these results in the order in which they appear on each search engine. Overture is a search engine that sells placement to the parties who are being searched. Hits on this search engine are therefore ranked based on whoever paid Overture the most in order to be placed highly in response to a query. On this list, none of the top ten results represent anything other than sales-related Barbie sites. Critical sites begin to appear only around the twentyfifth result, presumably after all paying clients have been served. Google, as we already know, uses a radically decentralized mechanism for assigning relevance. It counts how many sites on the Web have linked to a particular site that has the search term in it, and ranks the search results by placing a site with a high number of incoming links above a site with a low number of incoming links. In effect, each Web site publisher "votes" for a site's ,{[pg 286]}, ,{[pg 287]}, relevance by linking to it, and Google aggregates these votes and renders them on their results page as higher ranking. The little girl who searches for Barbie on Google will encounter a culturally contested figure. The same girl, searching on Overture, will encounter a commodity toy. In each case, the underlying efforts of Mattel, the producer of Barbie, have not changed. What is different is that in an environment where relevance is measured in nonmarket action--placing a link to a Web site because you deem it relevant to whatever you are doing with your Web site--as opposed to in dollars, Barbie has become a more transparent cultural object. It is easier for the little girl to see that the doll is not only a toy, not only a symbol of beauty and glamour, but also a symbol of how norms of female beauty in our society can be oppressive to women and girls. The transparency does not force the girl to choose one meaning of Barbie or another. It does, however, render transparent that Barbie can have multiple meanings and that choosing meanings is a matter of political concern for some set of people who coinhabit this culture. Yahoo! occupies something of a middle ground--its algorithm does link to two of the critical sites among the top ten, and within the top twenty, identifies most of the sites that appear on Google's top ten that are not related to sales or promotion. ={Barbie (doll), culture of+4} +<:pb> + % table moved after paragraph !_ Table 8.1: Results for "Barbie" - Google versus Overture and Yahoo! @@ -1948,17 +1952,31 @@ group{ Notes: -a. Large ambiguity results because technology transfer office reports increased revenues for yearend 2003 as $178M without reporting expenses; University Annual Report reports licensing revenue with all "revenue from other educational and research activities," and reports a 10 percent decline in this category, "reflecting an anticipated decline in royalty and license income" from the $133M for the previous year-end, 2002. The table reflects an assumed net contribution to university revenues between $100-120M (the entire decline in the category due to royalty/royalties decreased proportionately with the category). - -b. University of California Annual Report of the Office of Technology Transfer is more transparent than most in providing expenses--both net legal expenses and tech transfer direct operating expenses, which allows a clear separation of net revenues from technology transfer activities. +a. Large ambiguity results because technology transfer office reports increased +revenues for yearend 2003 as $178M without reporting expenses; University +Annual Report reports licensing revenue with all "revenue from other +educational and research activities," and reports a 10 percent decline in this +category, "reflecting an anticipated decline in royalty and license income" +from the $133M for the previous year-end, 2002. The table reflects an assumed +net contribution to university revenues between $100-120M (the entire decline +in the category due to royalty/royalties decreased proportionately with the +category). + +b. University of California Annual Report of the Office of Technology Transfer +is more transparent than most in providing expenses--both net legal expenses +and tech transfer direct operating expenses, which allows a clear separation of +net revenues from technology transfer activities. c. Minus direct expenses, not including expenses for unlicensed inventions. d. Federal- and nonfederal-sponsored research. -e. Almost half of this amount is in income from a single Initial Public Offering, and therefore does not represent a recurring source of licensing revenue. +e. Almost half of this amount is in income from a single Initial Public +Offering, and therefore does not represent a recurring source of licensing +revenue. -f. Technology transfer gross revenue minus the one-time event of an initial public offering of LiquidMetal Technologies. +f. Technology transfer gross revenue minus the one-time event of an initial +public offering of LiquidMetal Technologies. }group @@ -2134,7 +2152,7 @@ Empirically, it seems that the Internet is allowing us to eat our cake and have The conceptual answer has been that the image of "community" that seeks a facsimile of a distant pastoral village is simply the wrong image of how we interact as social beings. We are a networked society now--networked individuals connected with each other in a mesh of loosely knit, overlapping, flat connections. This does not leave us in a state of anomie. We are welladjusted, networked individuals; well-adjusted socially in ways that those who seek community would value, but in new and different ways. In a substantial departure from the range of feasible communications channels available in the twentieth century, the Internet has begun to offer us new ways of connecting to each other in groups small and large. As we have come to take advantage of these new capabilities, we see social norms and software coevolving to offer new, more stable, and richer contexts for forging new relationships beyond those that in the past have been the focus of our social lives. These do not displace the older relations. They do not mark a fundamental shift in human nature into selfless, community-conscious characters. We continue to be complex beings, radically individual and self-interested ,{[pg 377]}, at the same time that we are entwined with others who form the context out of which we take meaning, and in which we live our lives. However, we now have new scope for interaction with others. We have new opportunities for building sustained limited-purpose relations, weak and intermediate-strength ties that have significant roles in providing us with context, with a source of defining part of our identity, with potential sources for support, and with human companionship. That does not mean that these new relationships will come to displace the centrality of our more immediate relationships. They will, however, offer increasingly attractive supplements as we seek new and diverse ways to embed ourselves in relation to others, to gain efficacy in weaker ties, and to interpolate different social networks in combinations that provide us both stability of context and a greater degree of freedom from the hierarchical and constraining aspects of some of our social relations. ,{[pg 378]}, ,{[pg 379]}, -:C~ Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation +:B~ Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation 1~p3 Introduction |