Yochai Benkler on Information Production

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

(This text is a pretty comprehensive analysis.  I have this
whole PDF converted to text, for those who might want it. 
Too big to post.  Also, the formulas are probably
incomprehensible in the text conversion, unless by some
magic happenstance they translate all right -- I wouldn't
know, because I haven't dared to look at them too closely. 
-- Seth)


http://www.law.nyu.edu/benklery/IP&Organization.pdf

Intellectual Property and the Organization of Information
Production

by Yochai Benkler
November, 2000


(Concluding passage:)

[. . .] once one recognizes that intellectual property rules
affect how our society produces information and who is
likely to be an effective producer, not only how much
information our economy produces, choices with respect to
intellectual property rules become irreducibly normative, or
political. And this normative choice cannot be resolved by
reference to economics. This effect is particularly
important given the enormous empirical difficulty of
predicting the aggregate effects of any given proposed
change in intellectual property. 70 For, when we have no
clear prediction as to the aggregate effects of a rule
change, we are, as a matter of practical policy making, in
the ``all things aggregate being equal'' rubric. And at
least when we are in that rubric, it is indefensible to
frame in positive terms a decision that is by and large
normative: a choice of what kinds of people and
organizations, responding to what kinds of incentives and
operating under what types of constraints, will produce our
information environment.