are
proud to announce the following short course:
“Law and economics of shared infrastructure”
Prof.
Brett M. Frischmann
Politecnico
di Torino, 25-28 June 2013, 9-12AM
SCHEDULE
AND TOPICS:
Day One: Overview of Infrastructure Economics and Key
Concepts from Microeconomics (Chapters 1-3)
Day Two: Economics of Infrastructure Commons (Chapters
4-5)
Day
Three: Supply & Incentives; Congestion (Chapters 7-8)
Day
Four: Applications (Two or three chapters from second
half of the book; perhaps communication, transportation,
and Internet) (could have each student choose a chapter
and be prepared to give short presentation and raise
questions for class to discuss)
REFERENCES:
1. Infrastructure - The Social Value of Shared Resources
(Oxford University Press, 2012)
BIOGRAPHY:
Brett
Frischmann is Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo
School of Law, Yeshiva University, where he teaches
intellectual property and Internet law. He is currently
the Director of Cardozo's IP and Information Law Program,
an Affiliated Scholar of the Center for Internet and
Society at Stanford Law School, and an Affiliated Faculty
Member of The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in
Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.
He received a BA in Astrophysics from Columbia University,
an MS in Earth Resources Engineering from Columbia
University, and a JD from the Georgetown University Law
Center. After clerking for the Honorable Fred I. Parker of
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and
practicing at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in
Washington, DC, he joined the Loyola University, Chicago
law faculty in 2002.
ABSTRACT:
There
is a debate raging concerning the merits of private
control over (or conversely, open access to) various types
of resources. It takes place in a number of fields,
including the intellectual property and cyberlaw
literatures, as well as broader public debates concerning
propertization, privatization, deregulation, and
commercialization of such diverse things as communications
networks, government services, national forests and
scientific research. On the private control side, there
is robust economic theory in support of the market
mechanism with minimal government regulation. By
contrast, on the open access side, there is a frequent
call for protecting the “commons,” but the theoretical
support for this prescriptive call is underdeveloped from
an economics perspective. In fact, many that oppose
propertization, privatization, deregulation, and
commercialization view economics (the discipline) with
sincere suspicion and doubt.
In
this short course, Professor Brett Frischmann will discuss
insights from his recent book, Infrastructure: The Social
Value of Shared Resources (Oxford 2012). He will explain
why there are strong economic arguments for managing and
sustaining infrastructure resources in an openly
accessible manner. Professor Frischmann will help
students obtain a better understanding of how these
fundamental resources generate value for society and how
decisions regarding access to such resources affects
social welfare.
The
key insights from this analysis are that infrastructure
resources generate value as inputs into a wide range of
productive processes and that the outputs from these
processes are often public goods and social goods that
generate positive externalities that benefit society as a
whole. Managing such resources in an openly accessible
manner may be socially desirable from an economic
perspective because doing so facilitates these downstream
productive activities. For example, managing the Internet
infrastructure in an openly accessible manner facilitates
active citizen involvement in the production and sharing
of public and social goods. Over the past decade, this
has led to increased opportunities for a wide range of
citizens to engage in entrepreneurship, political
discourse, social network formation and community
building, among many other activities.
For
more information: Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin, E-mail:
demartin@polito.it, phone:
011-090-7217