Special Lecture

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Thursday, April 27, 2006
12:45 pm to 1:45 pm
Boalt Hall
Yochai Benkler, Yale Law School

Co-sponsored by: UC Berkeley School of Information, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, boalt.org.

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment.

In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing - and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained or lost by the decisions we make today.

Yochai Benkler is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. His particular focus has been on the neglected role of commons-based approaches towards management of resources in the digitally networked environment. He has written about the economics and political theory of rules governing telecommunications infrastructure, with a special emphasis on wireless communications, rules governing private control over information, in particular intellectual property, and of relevant aspects of U.S. constitutional law.

Last updated:

August 23, 2016