Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, is an essay written in 2002 by Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law at the Yale University School of Law. Written for those "who study organizations or make intellectual property policy", it is a first attempt to explore how intellectual property law might be reconsidered in light of the emergence of "commons-based peer production", a new model of economic production. Ronald Coase (born December 29, 1910) is a British economist. ... This article is about Linux-based operating systems, GNU/Linux, and related topics. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Yochai Benkler a Professor of Law at the Yale University Law School and the author of the influential paper Coases Penguin. ... For other uses, see Yale (disambiguation). ... In law, particularly in common law jurisdictions, intellectual property or IP refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea, or to some other intangible subject matter. ... According to Aaron Krowne of the Free Software Magazine, a Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) refers to any coordinated, (chiefly) internet-based effort whereby volunteers contribute project components, and there exists some process to combine them to produce a unified intellectual work. ...

"Commons-based peer production" is meant to describe a new model of economic production, different from both markets and firms, in which the creative energy of large numbers of people gets coordinated into large, meaningful projects, largely without financial compensation. All the examples mentioned are coordinated via the Internet; examples include Linux and Wikipedia. A market is a mechanism which allows people to trade, normally governed by the theory of supply and demand, so allocating resources through a price mechanism and bid and ask matching so that those willing to pay a price for something meet those willing to sell for it. ... Firm can have several meanings: Firm - a loose legal term for a company. ... This article is about Linux-based operating systems, GNU/Linux, and related topics. ... The Wikipedia logo Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. ...

The work is named after Ronald Coase who wrote the seminal 1937 work The Nature of the Firm that contrasted production via firms with production via markets; and Tux, Linux's penguin mascot, which symbolizes the most famous example of commons-based peer-production to date. Ronald Coase (born December 29, 1910) is a British economist. ... Ronald Coase (born December 29, 1910) is a British economist. ... The concepts behind Tux, the Linux mascot, were developed in email exchanges on a public mailing list. ... Genera Aptenodytes Eudyptes Eudyptula Megadyptes Pygoscelis Spheniscus Penguins (order Sphenisciformes, family Spheniscidae) are an order of flightless birds living in the southern hemisphere. ...

Benkler's ultimate thesis is that some of the restrictions that copyright and patent law place on the free flow of information are preventing commons-based peer-production from reaching its full potential. Since this is such an effective form of knowledge production, Benkler argues, it may well be worthwhile reconsidering whether these costs are really worth the benefits. For copyright issues in relation to Wikipedia itself, see Wikipedia:Copyrights. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or substance (known as an invention) which is new, inventive and useful. ...

As it is written largely for the public policy community, Benkler's analysis proceeds in frameworks currently fashionable in that community, especially that of Transaction Cost Economics. He suggests that other, perhaps more sociological, analyses may also be insightful, though he does not pursue them himself. In economics and related disciplines, a transaction cost is a cost incurred in making an economic exchange. ...

In his discussion of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Benkler makes particular note of the neutral point of view ethic: "Perhaps the most interesting characteristic about Wikipedia is the self-conscious social-norm-based dedication to objective writing." Note that several peer-production projects he mentions have more formal accreditation processes than Wikipedia; Linux has a relatively formal hierarchy to review new submissions to the kernel, for example, and NASA's Clickworkers project has participants do redundant work, so that careless or malicious work can be eliminated through statistical averaging. The Wikipedia logo Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. ... Shortcut: WP:NPOV Wikipedia policy is that all articles should be written from a neutral point of view. ... ClickWorkers was a small, experimental NASA project (run from November 2000 to September 2001) that showed that public volunteers (clickworkers), many working for a few minutes here and there and others choosing to work longer, can do some routine science analysis that would normally be done by a scientist or...

Citation

Yochai Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale Law Journal (2002-03) available at: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

See also

• Reed's law

Reeds law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. ...

External links

• "Coase's Penguin" paper (in Adobe pdf format)
• Papers by Yochai Benkler, links and pdfs.