Author

Our society increasingly perceives information as an owned commodity. Professor Benkler demonstrates that laws born of this conception are removing uses of information from the public domain and placing them in an enclosed domain where they are subject to an owner’s exclusive control. Professor Benkler argues that the enclosure movement poses a risk to the diversity of information sources in our information environment and abridges the freedom of speech. He then examines three laws at the center of this movement: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the proposed Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code, and the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act. Each member of this trio, Professor Benkler concludes, presents troubling challenges to First Amendment principles.

Professor of Law, New York University. LL.B., 1991, Tel Aviv University; J.D., 1994, Harvard University.

New communications technologies offer the potential to be used to promote fundamental values such as autonomy and democratic discourse, but, as Professor Yochai Benkler discusses in this Article, recent government actions have disfavored these possibilities by stressing private rights in information. He recommends that laws regulating the information economy be evaluated in terms of two effects: whether they empower one group to control the information environment of another group, and whether they reduce the diversity of perspectives communicated. Processor Benkler criticizes the nearly exclusive focus of information policy on property and commercial rights, which results in a concentrated system of production and homogenous information products. He suggests alternative policies that promote a commons in information, which would distribute information production more widely and permit a greater diversity of communications.