Bok om internettrevolusjonen

Yochai Benklers nye bok The Wealth of Networks - How Social Production Transform Markets and Freedom får meget rosende omtale av Lawrence Lessig:

Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks, is out. This is - by far - the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. ...

Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues - on either side of these debates - unless you have read this book.

Denne boken er ikke lett tilgjengelig. Jeg har så langt bare lest konklusjonen, og det alene er litt av en jobb. Her er noen sitater:

... policy makers and their advisers came to believe toward the end of the twentieth century that property in information and innovation was like property in wristwatches and automobiles. The more clearly you defined and enforced it, and the closer it was to perfect exclusive rights, the more production you would get. ...

... It makes access to information resources more expensive for all, while improving appropriability only for some. ...

... The rise of peer production is ... as rational and efficient ... as the assembly line was for the conditions at the turn of the twentieth. ...

... It turns out that we are not intellectual lemmings. Given freedom to participate in making our own information environment, we neither descend into Babel, nor do we replicate the hierarchies of the mass-mediated public spheres to avoid it.

... In law, we see a continual tightening of the control that the owners of exclusive rights are given. Copyrights are longer, apply to more uses, and are interpreted as reaching into every corner of valuable use. ... Social trends in the past few years, however, are pushing in the opposite direction.

We are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us, and how we act, alone and in concert with others, to shape our own understanding of the world we occupy and that of others with whom we share it. ...

We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the twentyfirst century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection. We can remove some of the transactional barriers to material opportunity, and improve the state of human development everywhere. ...

Jeg er enig med Lessig, denne boken bør leses.