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Consumers As Producers: The Personal Mainframe And The Law Of Computing, Peter P. Swire

Peter P Swire

This article explores the idea of “consumers-as-producers” as an organizing principle for understanding modern computing and cyberlaw. Leading legal commentators such as Yochai Benkler and Larry Lessig have emphasized the non-market nature of modern computing, stressing the shared actions of volunteers in blogs, wikis, and Open Source software. By recognizing the ways that ordinary individuals are also economic producers, this article describes major features of modern computing that have been minimized in these leading accounts.

Part I describes the history of home computing as an economic activity, where individuals’ home computers today are “personal mainframes,” with the processing power of …