Free Labour

Free Labour, with 'free' in this context meaning, at no cost to for-profit companies. The argument is that peer production, consumer interactivity are used by capitalism and for-profit firms to externalize costs. The argument was made by Tiziana Terranova and is here commented upon by Johan Soderbergh:

Structural use of interactive consumers to externalize costs, by Johan Soderbergh:

"The shifting of time-consuming tasks from paid employees to unpaid customers when accessing banking services, is one example of enhanced interactivity. Another example would be the 15.000 volunteer maintainers of AOL’s chat-rooms. Or the attempt by the Open Source initiative to co-opt the labour power of free software engineers. These are highpoints in a broader pattern, according to Tiziana Terranova. Free labour has become structural to late capitalist cultural economy. It is therefore totally inadequate to apply the leftist favourite narrative of authentic subcultures that are hijacked by commercialism. Authentic subcultures at this point of time is a delusion, she charges. ‘Independent’ cultural production takes place within a broader capitalist framework which has already anticipated and therefore modified the ‘active consumer’. Interactivity counts to nothing else than intensified exploitation of the audience power of the user/consumer. It is not different to the intensification of exploitation of wage labourers." (http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html )

See also:

How the use of FLOSS methods leads to lower transaction costs in business, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_11/soares/index.html