I feel that Joan Cheverie is a less adventurous thinker than Benkler. I say this because of the tension between their two views: Cheverie is less inclined to fully buy into the “Information Should Be Free” stance than Benkler and hedges her thought around information copyright.

She spends much of her time covering the cost structures of information, the original role of copyright and the effective differences between copying, deriving or licensing information. She does agree with Benkler that the expansion of copyright and the attempt of producers to arrive at better digital rights management to restrict information flow is not a good thing, but doesn’t go so far as to advocate its abolishment. Benkler sees more value in information in the public domain alone, with the added value being brought by the products and services that can be built upon that information. I believe that if the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act had not made it significantly more difficult to work with copyrighted materials, while copyright might still be an issue, concern surrounding it wouldn’t be quite as heated as it is.

Raquel, I appreciate your straight-forward and succinct abstract of the article. You caught the essence of her argument and brought it into the same arena with the other works we are becoming familiar with for scrutiny.