10 Facts About Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

From 1984 to 1987, Benkler was a member and treasurer of the Kibbutz Shizafon.

Yochai Benkler clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Stephen G Breyer from 1995 to 1996.

Yochai Benkler was a professor at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2003, and visited at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School, before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2003.

Yochai Benkler is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation.

Yochai Benkler is one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.

Yochai Benkler's research focuses on commons-based approaches to managing resources in networked environments.

Yochai Benkler coined the term commons-based peer production to describe collaborative efforts based on sharing information, such as free and open source software and Wikipedia.

Much of The Wealth of Networks is presented in economic terms, and Yochai Benkler raises the possibility that a culture in which information is shared freely could prove more economically efficient than one in which innovation is encumbered by patent or copyright law, since the marginal cost of re-producing most information is effectively nothing.

In 2011, Yochai Benkler published The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest.