© Copyright 2006, Yochai Benkler.
This online version has been created under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license - see www.benkler.org - and has been reformatted and designated as recommended reading for the Education Committee of CONGO - the Conference Of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations - in conjunction with the Committee's commitment to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World and related international Decades, agreements, conventions and treaties.
"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."
"Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
The Effects of Exclusive Rights
Autonomy, Property, and Commons
The Emergence of the Commercial Mass-Media Platform for the Public Sphere
Networked Information Economy Meets the Public Sphere
Critiques of the Claims that the Internet has Democratizing Effects
Is the Internet Too Chaotic, Too Concentrated, or Neither?
On Power Law Distributions, Network Topology, and Being Heard
Who Will Play the Watchdog Function?
Using Networked Communication to Work Around Authoritarian Control
The Transparency of Internet Culture
The Plasticity of Internet Culture: The Future of High-Production-Value Folk Culture
Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development
Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge
Industrial Organization of HDI-Related Information Industries
Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development