t current technology to valid social goals already established in the law. Copying may be easy, but decryption is not.
I call the soluti
on
telerights
. It involves cryptography, telephony, objects, and software meters -- things that are individually in vogue but have not yet congealed in a way that can protect intellectual property.
A telerighted document would be a miniature application capable of informing its publisher about its use. Each would be encrypted with a unique key and woul
d stay encrypted whenever stored on fixed media. The document would fetch the key from the publisher when someone wanted to view it and decrypt itself into a tamper-resistant part of RAM. Sending a key would be less expensive than resending the whole document, which is the Ted Nelson/pay-per-view solution. When the person was finished with the document, the document would notify its publisher and erase itself.
Ownership would be portable. I could resell or even rent my copy of
Terminator 5
, and the publisher wouldn't have to worry about piracy because it could block multiple users. Libraries wouldn't have to pay for unused copies, and even sma
ll publishers would have a cheap but strong method of guarding their intellectual property.
If I republished part of a compound document in my own work, I wouldn't have to pay for using all of it. The document would be able to tell its publisher exactly what part I used. If I grabbed a still from
Terminator 5
, I would not have to pay for the soundtrack. Fair-use quotations would also be easier to handle. Telerights would create an audit trail in case the courts had to judge the fairness of the use.
Parts of the telerights puzzle are being assembled. The Copyright Clearance Center has set up a Web site where people can negotiate licenses. It's also designing a network system for metering information used on CD-ROMs, which is great for big corporations that have the proper hardware. But this approach won't work well for everyone else because information won't stay on a central CD-ROM or server. Folks want to have their own copy to pass around.
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
has come closest, with a centralized client/server solution that appears to rely on a private network. It's proprietary technology, and information about it is limited. But from what I've heard, PARC's thinking is similar to mine. Whatever the final details are, telerights should be a public standard for open, peer-to-peer networks. While none of this technology is new, the necessary networking infrastructure is not in place, and getting it there will require tremendous cooperation among some very powerful companies, such as cable and phone providers. Computers and their OSes will have to be modified.
While companies should be able to maintain telerights, the government will have to regulate them, just as it does the money supply. Information, after all, is money.
photo_link (32 Kbytes)
Wade Riddick is a graduate student and a former National Science Foundation Fellow in the government department at the University of Texas at Austin. You can contact him at
riddick@jeeves.la.utexas.edu
.
From Copyrights to Telerights
