Gift Economy in Dispute

Seth Finkelstein: Wikipedia, and the difficulties of criticizing digital-sharecropping.

In brief, there’s two important ideas somewhat in conflict:

1) (fact) There are new businesses which can be built on data-mining or large collections of small amounts of unpaid labor

2) (belief) There is social or economic value in openness and commons

Fascinating discussion here, stemming from another debate. Read the comments, too.