Yochai Benkler
Encyclopedia
Yochai Benkler is an Israeli
-American professor of Law and author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School
. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
at Harvard University
.
Shizafon. He received his LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and J.D.
from Harvard Law School
in 1994. He worked at the law firm Ropes & Gray from 1994-1995. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from 1995 to 1996.
He was a professor at New York University School of Law
from 1996 to 2003, and visited at Yale Law School
and Harvard Law School (during 2002-2003), before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2003. In 2007, Benkler joined Harvard Law School, where he teaches and is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Benkler is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation
. In 2011, his research led him to receive the $100,000 Ford Foundation Social Change Visionaries Award.
Benkler's research focuses on commons-based approaches to managing resources in networked environments. He coined the term 'commons-based peer production
' to describe collaborative efforts based on sharing information, such as free and open source software
and Wikipedia
. He also uses the term 'networked information economy' to describe a "system of production, distribution, and consumption of information goods characterized by decentralized individual action carried out through widely distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market strategies."
Benkler's 2006 book The Wealth of Networks
examines the ways in which information technology permits extensive forms of collaboration that have potentially transformative consequences for economy and society. Wikipedia
, Creative Commons
, Open Source Software and the blogosphere
are among the examples that Benkler draws upon. (The Wealth of Networks is itself published under a Creative Commons
license). For example, Benkler argues that blogs and other modes of participatory communication can lead to "a more critical and self-reflective culture", where citizens are empowered by the ability to publicize their own opinions on a range of issues. Much of The Wealth of Networks
is presented in economic terms, and Benkler raises the possibility that a culture in which information is shared freely could prove more economically efficient than one in which innovation is encumbered by patent
or copyright
law, since the marginal cost of re-producing most information is effectively nothing.
Benkler coined the term 'Jalt' as a contraction of jealousy and altruism, to describe the dynamic in commons-based peer production where some participants get paid while others do not, or "whether people get paid differentially for participating." The term was first introduced in his seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm." It is described in more technical terms as "social-psychological component of the reward to support monetary appropriation by others or... where one agent is jealous of the rewards of another."
Benkler appeared in the documentary film
Steal This Film
, which is available through Creative Commons
. He discussed various issues, including: how the changing cost structures in film and music production are enabling new stratums of society to create.
Benkler is a strong proponent of Wikileaks
, characterizing it as a prime example of non-traditional media filling a public watchdog role left vacant by traditional news outlets. In a draft paper written for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
in February 2011, he uses governmental vilification and prosecution of Wikileaks as a case study demonstrating the need for more robust legal protection for independent media.
In August 2011, Benkler was a keynote speaker at the Wikimania
conference in Haifa
, Israel
. That same August, Benkler's latest book on social cooperation
online and off, titled The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, was published.
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
-American professor of Law and author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
Biography
In 1984, Benkler was the treasurer of KibbutzKibbutz
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...
Shizafon. He received his LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and J.D.
Juris Doctor
Juris Doctor is a professional doctorate and first professional graduate degree in law.The degree was first awarded by Harvard University in the United States in the late 19th century and was created as a modern version of the old European doctor of law degree Juris Doctor (see etymology and...
from Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
in 1994. He worked at the law firm Ropes & Gray from 1994-1995. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from 1995 to 1996.
He was a professor at New York University School of Law
New York University School of Law
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University. Established in 1835, the school offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in law, and is located in Greenwich Village, in the New York City borough of Manhattan....
from 1996 to 2003, and visited at Yale Law School
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
and Harvard Law School (during 2002-2003), before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2003. In 2007, Benkler joined Harvard Law School, where he teaches and is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Benkler is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation
Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation is a 501 educational organization founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United States government....
. In 2011, his research led him to receive the $100,000 Ford Foundation Social Change Visionaries Award.
Works
Commons-based peer production
Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical...
' to describe collaborative efforts based on sharing information, such as free and open source software
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
and Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
. He also uses the term 'networked information economy' to describe a "system of production, distribution, and consumption of information goods characterized by decentralized individual action carried out through widely distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market strategies."
Benkler's 2006 book The Wealth of Networks
The Wealth of Networks
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by law professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006....
examines the ways in which information technology permits extensive forms of collaboration that have potentially transformative consequences for economy and society. Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
, Open Source Software and the blogosphere
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
are among the examples that Benkler draws upon. (The Wealth of Networks is itself published under a Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
license). For example, Benkler argues that blogs and other modes of participatory communication can lead to "a more critical and self-reflective culture", where citizens are empowered by the ability to publicize their own opinions on a range of issues. Much of The Wealth of Networks
The Wealth of Networks
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by law professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006....
is presented in economic terms, and Benkler raises the possibility that a culture in which information is shared freely could prove more economically efficient than one in which innovation is encumbered by patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
or copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
law, since the marginal cost of re-producing most information is effectively nothing.
Benkler coined the term 'Jalt' as a contraction of jealousy and altruism, to describe the dynamic in commons-based peer production where some participants get paid while others do not, or "whether people get paid differentially for participating." The term was first introduced in his seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm." It is described in more technical terms as "social-psychological component of the reward to support monetary appropriation by others or... where one agent is jealous of the rewards of another."
Benkler appeared in the documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
Steal This Film
Steal This Film
Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol....
, which is available through Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
. He discussed various issues, including: how the changing cost structures in film and music production are enabling new stratums of society to create.
Benkler is a strong proponent of Wikileaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
, characterizing it as a prime example of non-traditional media filling a public watchdog role left vacant by traditional news outlets. In a draft paper written for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review is a student-run law review Harvard Law School. The journal is published two times per year and contains articles, essays, and book reviews concerning civil rights and liberties...
in February 2011, he uses governmental vilification and prosecution of Wikileaks as a case study demonstrating the need for more robust legal protection for independent media.
In August 2011, Benkler was a keynote speaker at the Wikimania
Wikimania
Wikimania is an annual international conference for users of the wiki projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation...
conference in Haifa
Haifa
Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of over 268,000. Another 300,000 people live in towns directly adjacent to the city including the cities of the Krayot, as well as, Tirat Carmel, Daliyat al-Karmel and Nesher...
, Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. That same August, Benkler's latest book on social cooperation
Cooperation
Cooperation or co-operation is the process of working or acting together. In its simplest form it involves things working in harmony, side by side, while in its more complicated forms, it can involve something as complex as the inner workings of a human being or even the social patterns of a...
online and off, titled The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, was published.
External links
- Official page at Harvard Law SchoolHarvard Law SchoolHarvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
- Interview with Benkler
- Speaking at Pop!Tech 2005
- Online Edition of The Wealth of Networks
- TED Talks: Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics at TEDTED (conference)TED is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading"....
in 2005 - The Penguin and The Leviathan: The Science and Practice of Cooperation at The Santa Fe Institute 2010.
- Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0: Benkler's chair lecture at Harvard Law, as reported in the Harvard Law RecordHarvard Law RecordThe Harvard Law Record is an independent, biweekly student-edited newspaper based at Harvard Law School. Founded in 1946, it is the oldest law school newspaper in the United States.-Characteristics:...
- From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation. Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access