Wikileaks revisited: Is Julian Assange a straw man?

Two interesting recent publications on Wikileaks by US law professors. Alasdair Roberts says that the contribution of the Wikileaks phenomenon to transparency has been hugely over-exaggerated, and Yochai Benkler who says more or less the opposite

Intellectual Property’s Leviathan

Neoliberalism is a complex, multifaceted concept. As such, it offers many possible points of entry into my primary field of study, that of intellectual property (IP) law. We might begin by investigating tensions between IP law and a purely economic conception of neoliberalism, for example. Or we might consider whether or how IP law might be “insulated from democratic governance” while also being rapidly assembled. In these few pages, I want to focus instead on a different line of inquiry, one that reveals the powerful grip that one particular neoliberal conception has on our contemporary imaginary: the neoliberal conception of the state. Today, both those who defend robust private IP law and their most prominent critics, I will show, typically describe the state in its first instance as inertial, heavy, bureaucratic, ill-informed, and perilously corruptible and corrupt

Foreword: The Opposite of Property?

In November of 2001, Duke University School of Law held a conference on the public domain; the outside of the intellectual property system, the material that is free for all to use and to build upon.1 So far as we could tell, this was the first conference on the subject, which is surprising when one realizes the central role of the public domain in our traditions of speech, innovation and culture. In many ways, this imbalance-the hundreds of conferences, centers and initiatives that have intellectual property as their focus, and the comparative dearth of attention on the public domain-provided the best explanation for the event

Some Peer-to-Peer, Democratically and Voluntarily Produced Thoughts About \u27The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,\u27 by Yochai Benkler

In this review essay, Bartow concludes that The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler is a book well worth reading, but that Benkler still has a bit more work to do before his Grand Unifying Theory of Life, The Internet, and Everything is satisfactorily complete. It isn\u27t enough to concede that the Internet won\u27t benefit everyone. He needs to more thoroughly consider the ways in which the lives of poor people actually worsen when previously accessible information, goods and services are rendered less convenient or completely unattainable by their migration online. Additionally, the Internet is easy enough to be optimistic enough as a technological achievement, but just as nuclear fission can be harnessed both for electrical power generation and annihilating destruction, the raw communicative capabilities can\u27t be qualitatively assessed without reference to specific content. Pornography and its symbiotic relationship to the Internet require thoughtful scrutiny. Astroturf and other targeted attempts to instrumentally distort democratic discourse need to be analyzed and possibly also rechanneled or contained. The impact of moving resources online upon people who substantially live in an offline, analog world, needs to be contemplated more fully

The Information Commons: a public policy report

This report describes the history of the information commons, presents examples of online commons that provide new ways to store and deliver information, and concludes with policy recommendations. Available in PDF and HTML versions.BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at NYU SCHOOL OF LAW Democracy Program, Free Expression Policy Project 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor New York NY 10013 Phone: (212) 998-6730 Web site: www.brennancenter.org Free Expression Policy Project: www.fepproject.or