Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler is a law professor at Harvard University who has written a book on the legal economics of mass collaboration on the Internet titled The Wealth of Networks.

Benkler's work focuses on the shift from an economy that is based on a mixture of market economics and government welfare provision to the addition of commons-based peer production, a phenomena that we can observe with free and open source software like Linux, online knowledge communities like Wikipedia and other projects that used online mass collaboration like NASA Clickworkers. Benkler analyzes the effect that this new networked information economy has on the existing economic situation and on the liberal society and how the law will need to be changed in order to best fit with this movement.