I doubt there are many libertarians who see OS or Wikipedia as threats to the market–just look at Eric Raymond and Jimmy Wales. Aside from a handful of Galambosians and patent-worshipping Randroids, I think they’re pretty much the choir for this sermon.

Where I think they might be less likely to come on board is the extent to which peer-production in the information field will have an effect on the larger meta-system that includes physical manufacturing.

Most of the the old Tom Peters rhetoric about “oursourcing everything,” “self-managed teams,” etc., to the extent that it was actually put into practice, has occurred within corporate frameworks where the HQ retains ownership of intellectual property, branding, and finance. A good example is Nike, where the actual production facilities are outsourced to idependently owned sweatshops, but Nike’s ownership of the trademark enables it to charge tribute in the form of a brand-name markup.

Such forms of legal privilege operate, more broadly, as a sort of toll-gate enabling the old corporate economy to charge tribute in most areas of cultural and knowledge production. As Benkler pointed out, a majority of Americans own the basic capital equipment for knowledge production–the personal computer–and can obtain capital equipment for high quality desktop publishing, music editing, etc., for at most a few thousand $$ more. The entry barriers are virtually non-existent, and the marginal reproduction cost is zero. The only thing stopping knowledge and entertainment workers from becoming self-employed peer-group syndicates is the legal privileges upheld by the copyright Nazis.

But I suspect we’ve reached a singularity where the cost of detecting and punishing transgressions against the IP gatekeepers is greater than the benefit; and from here on out the costs of enforcement will rise at the same time as the costs of evasion will fall.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, in physical production with low overhead and capitalization costs. A good example is temp employment, where the temp agency typically charges the employer three times what it pays the worker, even though administrative costs per unit of labor are very low. Temp employment is ripe for cooperative ownership on the pattern of the longshoremen’s hiring hall. Probably the biggest barrier is non-competition agreements and other contractual restrictions.