No subject is the source of more fear, uncertainty, and dread in the
networked information community than is the subject of copyright, or,
more generally, the subject of intellectual property. Creators of
intellectual property worry that networks are too leaky for their
property to be secure from corruption and misappropriation. Users of
intellectual property worry that networks are too rigid and expensive
for their property to be available and affordable in all of the ways and
for all of the purposes they have in mind. And, developers of networked
information resources and services are frustrated by the complex and
unresponsive character of the existing intellectual property permissions
system. There must be a better way to build an information superhighway!
The early evolution of the Internet information environment has
been driven by a "circle of gifts" intellectual property system. As a
general rule, creators of Internet intellectual property (software,
documents, etc.) make that property freely and anonymously available to
any and all interested parties. In return, they expect that property of
use to them will be available equally freely and anonymously.
Information circulates in this system in much the same way it does
around an office or along a research front. Formal, predominantly
'commercial,' scholarly and scientific communication and publication
processes operate by quite different principles. They are more concerned
about control and compensation than comparable Internet, 'non-
commercial' processes have been to date.
The future Internet and the emerging National Information
Infrastructure (NII) must support both of these models of knowledge
creation, distribution, and utilization. The Internet community must
come to recognize and respect the interests of commercially minded
providers of information, and those providers must understand and
appreciate that noncommercial approaches will continue to be an
important feature of the Internet and NII information environments.
Commercial and noncommercial providers of networked information,
however, assess the opportunities and challenges of the networked
environment quite differently. For instance, commercial providers tend
to view the reduced costs of the network environment as an opportunity
to increase profits, whereas noncommercial providers tend to view them
as an opportunity to lower prices. And, noncommercial providers tend to
view the increased ease by which information can be redistributed in the
network environment as an opportunity to promote awareness and use,
whereas commercial users tend to view it as a threat to existing or
potential revenues. Builders of information highways must be responsive
to the different interests and concerns of both types of providers.
Noncommercial and commercial providers of networked information
have a common interest in improving ways and means for managing
networked intellectual property. Making it easier for network users to
discover, organize, and access the information that they need is in
everyone's interest, and so are effective ways to authenticate the
identity of users seeking access to intellectual property, to account
and perhaps bill for their use, and to protect the security and
integrity of networked information resources and services. Providers of
such resources and services, however, must have the option to use or not
to use these sorts of intellectual property management capabilities.
Builders of information highways must implement these capabilities as
services available to networked information providers rather than as
features of the network information infrastructure itself that must be
used by all providers. Implementing intellectual property management
capabilities as services on rather than as a feature of the network
infrastructure not only places their use at the discretion of
information providers, but also creates a competitive marketplace for
provision of such capabilities. Relying upon such a marketplace to
provide capabilities of this sort is a much more comforting prospect
than relying upon, for example, a telecommunications monopoly or a
government-mandated standardization process to provide them.
The unique characteristics of networked intellectual property have
barely begun to reveal themselves. It is already an open question,
however, whether copyrights or patents are the more appropriate vehicle
for registering and protecting one's ownership of a particular parcel of
intellectual property. Certainly the distinction between software and
information as well as the distinction between an idea and expression of
an idea have begun to blur in network environments, and both of these
distinctions are fundamental to the existing ways of thinking about
intellectual property. The attribution of ownership to intellectual
property is confounded, moreover, by the highly collaborative manner in
which networked information is generated, refined, and distributed.
Builders of information highways, as well as noncommercial and
commercial providers of networked information, must be flexible and
agile if they are going to keep up with the creative behaviors of
network users.
Paul Evan Peters is executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information.