I stopped by the Center for American Progress this morning to hear Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler give a speech based on his book The Wealth of Networks. I'm about halfway through the book. Usually I'm a pretty fast reader (a skill I developed as a reporter) but this one is taking me awhile because I keep putting it down out of frustration. I don't particularly care for writers who cite one small but legitimate anecdote, and then magnify it beyond comprehension in order to make a sweeping generalization. Well, if you think anecdotes are magnified disproportionately in a 400-page book, imagine what happens to them when the author has to condense his presentation to an hour-long discussion.

Benkler was introduced as a "stone-throwing radical" who had been the treasurer of an Israeli kibbutz. I wasn't aware of this part of his background, but it explains why he sees a future world based on "social production," i.e., sharing, not unlike a kibbutz or, perhaps, Robert Owen's New Harmony commune on the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. Of course, New Harmony had collapsed within two years of its launch -- turns out the idea of abandoning property and industrial heirarchies didn't put a lot of food on the table, and led people to turn on each other -- but that Lord of the Flies result isn't found in the Brave New World of Benkler's writings. No, he is very much a descendent of 19th century Utopian Socialists, although he has one isolated line in his book where he insists his visions are not Utopian. (He doesn't disown the Socialist label).

I would need an entire book to offer substantive rebuttals to all of his points. As this is a blog post, I will just single out one odd thing. He chooses conflicting metrics to measure worth in the digital realm. To begin with, he praised open source software (not surprisingly) and also the collaborative nature of Wikipedia. He noted that Nature had found it to be comparable to Britannica (no, he didn't mention the stinging rebuttal later published by Britannica of that article.) He also praised the computational power of SETI@Home, which exceeds the fastest supercomputer by tapping unused computing capacity of volunteers. SETI@Home and Wikipedia don't contribute in any meaningful way to the US economy, but he ranked them in social mportance far higher than any commercial encyclopedia or proprietary supercomputer.

He then sought to undermine intellectual property by showing two pie charts. The first -- and I don't know the source of the data so I can't speak to its accuracy -- showed a slight majority of revenues in software coming from services, not software itself. He then took a leap, assuming that all of those services being sold were for open source software, thus leaving proprietary software as a minority of the overall market.

His second pie chart reflected industry revenues, and showed two tiny wedges symbolizing the music and movie industries. (He didn't have wedges for publishing or video games.) He said these two wedges represented the copyright industry, and went on to suggest copyright was the only relevant aspect of IP to his discussion. There were two large wedges on this pie chart. One was software; Benkler said this was non-IP because the previous chart showed us that software really consisted of services being sold for open source software. The other large chart was hardware, like PCs and servers; this also was non-IP, he said, dismissing the patents involved in these devices as unimportant, as "widget" competition didn't need patents.

With IP dismissed from software and IT, and with no inclusion of copyright industries other than movies or music, Benkler was able to argue that since IP represented a small part of the pie, we should feel no shame in seeing IP rights eroded so that artists could build on artists' works without seeking licenses. (He showed two mash-up videos that he acknowledged were likely illegal, including one that opened with footage from Braveheart).

I think you've seen the questionable makeup of his pie charts. But let's assume that both are accurate. Why should we we be assigning importance of various industries based on their revenues? After all, SETI@Home and Wikipedia don't even form a tiny wedge by that measurement, yet we've been told that they are critically important and a sign of the future. I think the answer is that when Benkler's interests are served by using a metric that doesn't involve money, he does so, but when his argument is more easily made by adopting a revenue metric, he uses that one.

Now perhaps you can see why I have to keep putting down his book and taking a deep breath.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 3:15 PM | Academia

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