comes a much different story. It's a very interactive media. It's a medium for storing visual information and accessing it very rapidly. And this opens up just whole new situations for many different kinds of applications.

AUDIENCE. Thank you.

Mr. TAUSKEY. Thank you. I think just in reference to that last question, I might add that what we are seeing with interactive video disks is actually a new form of publication. And that should hold some meaning as you consider the copyright issues.

For example, I invited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology folks to come down and show us some of their very good work in their area over the last few years. Unfortunately, theirs is not very portable. They've got some very interesting experiments going on it, strangely enough, the school of architecture.

I have a video disk that illustrates a lot of the things that they're doing, which if there is an interest at some point during this seminar, if I can kindly beg the use of a video disk player from some of our demonstrators, I'll be happy to show you little portions of that. So just catch me if you're interested.

I'd like to now introduce John Harrigan of the Sony Corporation. I should say that John works with us on our Library of Congress optical disk pilot program. One of the contractors in that effort is Sony Corporation.

John?

Mr. HARTIGAN. Thank you, Bill. By the way, down here I thought I was nothing but a redblooded, clean-living young America boy, but I discover that I'm a supplier to pirates, when I got here.

The nice thing about working with optical disks is that they're shiny, and if the audience begins to go to sleep you can direct the light in their eyes and wake them back up again. [Laughter.]

The optical disk is really an omnibus medium. I tried to call the Sony disk a compound data disk, and the public relations department said, no, you can't do that. But it is truly a compound data device, because the disk I have in my hand has analog video, the kind of video that you're used to seeing on your TV screen. It has digital audio information on it. It has digital computer data on it. It's got analog audio, digital audio, all of these things. And they're all accessible. They're very rapidly accessible.

The farthest point of any piece of information on the disk is less than six seconds away. So that, for instance, with the little compact disk that the people from Magnavox showed you, you can store 550 megabytes of data. The information there is never more than a second away. On this disk, we can store a gigabyte, or a thousand million bytes of data.

I don't know much about the law myself, but I daresay that this disk can hold all that all of you know about the law on the one disk. [Laughter.]

It has incredible storage density. When we couple this-the reason probably that the video disk was a marketing disaster for some companies was that we tried to make a new technology do an old job. We tried to simply transport movies with it, when in fact it is-another acronym coming up—a ROM, a read-only memory.

The disks cannot be erased, they cannot be altered. They are in fact-if the data on them changes, then the disk becomes valueless. But they're very inexpensive. They're made of a very medium-expensive plastic, polymethylmethacrylate. There are about 15 billion impressions in the disk surface, and they're all discrete and they're all identifiable.

When we tie with ROM to a computer, we can-it's just-the number of things we can do with it, I've said often, most of the applications for the video disks haven't been thought of yet. And a magazine editor immediately asked me what those appplications were. [Laughter.]

The equipment that I brought along to show you what you can do with a ROM of this size tied to a micro computer is in the next room. And I'd rather let the equipment do the talking. And so, thank you very much.

Mr. LEIBOWITZ. In terms of mechanics, for the rest of the afternoon, we have an hour and a half remaining before we need to break so we can get ready for the reception and the dinner.

But we have set up in board room three, one, in meeting rooms B and E, the same area where we went this morning for demonstrations, the equipment that you've heard described to you this afternoon, a demonstration of the Control Data Plato system in board room three, the other equipment that wasn't D&E is there.

There is also in the atrium area Myer Kutz with a demonstration of online data base access. And outside board room D and E is Bill Tauskey from Visicorp Corporation to show you how you can copy copy-protected, so-called uncopyable, computer

software. And to explain to you a little bit about what software is, that you've heard so much about.

DINNER SPEECH

INTRODUCTION OF SPEAKER

Mr. KEPLINGER. I wanted to say a few words on behalf of David Ladd, the Register of Copyrights, to thank everyone for their participation, to thank Members of Congress for their participation in this session, and for asking us to organize this program for you all.

This evening, we're privileged to have a very fine dinner speaker who will be talking with us further. And there are three of us in the Copyright Office who have worked on organizing this program who are here this evening, David Leibowitz, who many of you know, myself, Mike Keplinger, I've talked with many of you on the telephone about organizing this meeting, how to get it going, and Harriet Oler, who has played a very important part and is a very significant contributor to our team effort that helped organize this whole program and got it going.

[Applause.]

And all of the other people in the Copyright Office too, who have been supporting us and working with us and helping get this program going for everyone. So we've asked Harriet this evening to introduce our dinner speaker.

Harriet?

Ms. OLER. It's really easy to organize a conference such as this one with such nice cooperation from everyone. And I want to thank you in turn for your wonderful cooperation.

Our speaker this evening, Dr. Martin Greenberger, has asked me to give brief introductory remarks, which I will do because I know you've heard a lot of dialog today, and what we're really interested in is hearing Dr. Greenberger's speech.

My briefness in no way denigrates his significant accomplishments. He is the IBM professor of computers and information systems at the University of California at Los Angeles. And he's the author of numerous books on science policy issues, including one written about 20 years ago called Computers and the World of the Future, which presages many of the issues which you all have come to discuss today.

He's currently working on a project involving electronic publishing and the intellectual property concerns raised by electronic publishing. And I think his background makes him a particular appropriate speaker for our symposium on copyright and new technology.

Without further ado, I'd like to welcome Dr. Martin Greenberger.

Dr. GREENBERGER. Thank you very much.

THE LONG-RANGE FUTURE IMPACT COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ON SOCIETY To introduce the subject of computer systems, I shall report on a conversation overheard in the Garden Restaurant last night.

These four professional women were sitting at a table in the restaurant talking about their careers, making comparisons. After awhile, it got a bit competitive. They started challenging each other on how far back their professions went-claiming seniority, as it were.

The first woman was a lawyer with the Copyright Office. She dated her profession to the practice of Roman Law before the start of the Common Era. This, she enthused, was the very basis of modern Civil Law. She buttressed her claim with references to the Code of Law of Hammurabi in Babylonia, a millenium earlier still.

The second woman was a physician. She spoke of the work of Hippocrates and Aristotle, and the perceptive investigations into human physiology and anatomy in ancient Greece during the third and fourth centuries B.C.E. As the the Laws of Hammurabi, she pointed out, they provided a code of medical ethics and designated a fee schedule for surgical procedures. And, to leave no doubt of her profession's precedence, she cited ancient Chinese medicine still another millenium before, with its theory of the circulation of the blood and the vital function of the heart, along with its detailed understanding of the proper points for acupuncture.

Then they turned to the third woman, a member of the House of Representatives. Hesitating and somewhat bewildered, the Congresswoman gradually began to speak in a candid way about the early years before her life took direction. With her courage mounting, she braced herself, then admitted to having pursued for a short time the calling commonly known as the oldest of professions. Silence fell over the group, whether out of embarrassment or simply because the Congresswoman's trump card clearly seemed to have won the contest.

The awkwardness ended as the fourth woman spoke up. She was a computer scientist-a systems analyst. "At the very start of Genesis," began the final contender, "it is written that God created the world from chaos." Suppressing a smile the computer analyst asked, "Who do you suppose created the chaos?"

THE COMPUTER

My talk this evening on "The Post-Print Society" could be subtitled "Computer/ Communications as an Environment for the 21st Century." I do not mean to suggest by the title that print will be passe' in the 21st century, anymore than I think Daniel Bell meant that industry would be obsolete in his post-industrial society. I simply submit that the emerging electronic emphasis in the way information is collected, composed, and distributed could become dominant in the next century.

By the way, Daniel Bell is writing another book on the significance of technology. He has been looking for a name to apply to the current era: computer, electronics, information, telecommunications, teleprocessing? Which descriptor best captures the essence of the times?

My choice would be computer era. The computer has been and continues to be a profoundly fertile concept, intellectually as well as technologically. It promises to transform the environment of all civilized society and set an indelible tone for the foreseeable future.

It is interesting to consider the etymology of a term that connotes a pivotal age in the history of civilization. In Latin "com" means "with" and "putata" has a number of meanings including "think." So the computer is a mechanism to think with. This is a great rendition.

The first computers were not called that. They were referred to as analytic engines, difference analyzers, numerical integrators, and calculators. The computer I started with at Harvard University in 1950, for instance, was known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (more frequently the Mark I). It was the first working computer. Its design goes back to 1939. With its clicking electromechanical relays and large banks of externally set switches, it took directions from programs punched with round holes into closed loops of revolving cardboard tape. This unforgettable equipment was in active service from 1945 through the early 1950s.

In those days the emphasis was definitely on calculation. These machines were number crunchers first and foremost. The Mark I, for example, produced voluminous tables of mathematical functions day-in and day-out, week-after-week, yearafter-year.

Times have changed. Today, everyone realizes the computer has far broader and deeper connotations than originally recognized, going well beyond numerical calculation.

There have been five generations in the history of automatic computers, not counting museum specimens like that the Mark I. The first computers in the modern sense of the word, such as the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator or ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, used electronic tubes. The Univac was the first such machine to be made commercially available.

The second generation came with the invention of the transistor. This was a big step forward. Transistors offered a much more satisfactory means of storage and logie. The third generation arrived with the introduction of printed circuits. Transistors were printed or etched on pieces of silicon. Such fabrication lent itself to mass production.

In the fourth and current generation, printed circuits have reached an advanced state. Circuits are being integrated onto chips with very high densities. This is known as VLSI.

People are now speculating on the fifth and even sixth generation. Fifth generation computers, called knowledge information processing systems, will be endowed with expert knowledge. Present day computers are serial machines. They basically perform one task at a time. Fifth-generation computers will be more humanlike in function. Their parallel architecture will enable them to do many things at once, roughly in the manner of the human nervous system. This could greatly improve the speed, capability, and versatility of automatic computation.

With sixth and future generations, computers will function more like biological systems, using biological storage and optical technology for logic and transmission. Computer technology has not reached the end of the road in any sense. Viewed retrospectively a hundred years from now, the late twentieth century may be regarded as just the beginning in the evolution of computer systems for control and communi

cation.

THE CHIP

One measure of the progress already made with computers is the quantity of integrated circuits being packed onto a chip. Circuit fabricators currently compress 600,000 transistors on six millimeters (a quarter of an inch). Even as these 256k RAM chips are beginning to become commerially available, companies have already begun work on one megabit chips with four times the storage capacity.

The packing density has steadily improved since integrated circuits were first developed by Texas Instruments and Fairchild back in 1959. Each year from 1959 to 1973, densities doubled. They have been increasing at a rate of one-and-a-half times per year since 1973. Inasmuch as logical elements can only be so small and so close together, this constant improvement eventually must subside. Nevertheless, one billion transistors per chip is being projected by the end of the century.

As densities have increased, prices for computer chips have come down dramatically. In addition, the size of memory elements has grown from 8 to 16 to 32 bits. However one gauges it, progress has been quite remarkable. In coming years, there will be other breakthroughs and advances, each one outdoing its predecessor if patterns of the past are repeated.

Every step forward in computer technology has had an impact on society. Technological advance is a driving force and an impetus for change. But the effects are not just in one direction. Progress in technology is itself determined and modified by complex social forces interacting with political and economic interests finding expression in customs and contracts, legislation and law.

An obvious illustration is the set of regulations affecting patents and copyrights. One might find it curious that copyright has been asked to play such an active role in the development of chips and software. It is certainly ironic that the very technologies whose ramifications have most upset traditional copyright practice are themselves objects of copyright protection.

Chips and computer software are new forms of intellectual property. They are not at all the sort of product of creative endeavor the original framers of copyright legislation had in mind. Neither technology has yet been well defined or satisfactorily incorporated within existing procedures, despite the extensive use made of copyright by their designers and suppliers. These technologies need protection, but in a manner suited to their peculiar characteristics and to the critical roles they play in the manufacture and application of computers.

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Software has been vital to the development of computers from the beginning. In certain periods, the growth of software has been nothing short of explosive. The most recent such occasion was during the rapid commercial rise of personal computers during the first half of the 1980s, an episode amply covered by the media.

Only a few years ago, strategic planners in the computer industry were first proposing commercial production of personal computers. The idea was innovative and controversial to the large computer companies at the time. Market prognosticators were trying to sell the concept to management by forecasting sales in the thousands of machines a year. Their projections, viewed as much too high, met with considerable scepticism.

The record is that actual sales exceeded forecasts by several orders of magnitude. Revenues grew by factors of five in three successive years. The forecasts were essentially surpassed before the ink was dry.

Upwards of ten million personal computers now reside in homes and offices throughout the country. The number is expected to continue to grow significantly, if sporadically, in future years, with as many as one out of three households projected to have some kind of personal computer by 1990. There may eventually be as many personal computers as TV sets nationwide.

One sign of the quick eruption of personal computers is the amount of venture capital going into microcomputer-related fields as compared to other fields. In 1980, the energy and energy-related sector received about 20 percent of venture capital. One year later it received less than six percent. In 1980, computer-related industries received about 26 percent of venture capital. The following year they received 34

percent, over a third of all capital made available to new companies. Much of this capital went to firms producing either personal computers and especially software these firms need to round out their products and secure a foothold in the marketplace.

The software business requires only modest capital investment to get started. In addition, its main resource is talented and creative people. For these reasons, the business tends to be individualistic and innovative in nature and has typically been independent of the mainframe computer business. Large computer companies often do not manufacture their own software. Instead, they go outside to contract for it. IBM arranged with Microsoft to obtain the operating system for its personal computer. Companies like Microsoft are doing very well. Some starting quite small have experienced phenomenal growth.

The nature of the computer hardware and software industries may change in time. Once personal computers and computer work stations begin to saturate the home and office market, the dynamic growth historically experienced to computer hardware is likely to shift increasingly to software, as current trends already confirm. The result is that giant companies in computer hardware are going to want an increasing share of the software market to sustain corporate growth and reach ambitious revenue objectives. Computer programs for data services, electronic transactions, and entertainment may become to the computer industry what electrical appliances have been to the electric power industry. Companies like IBM will want to be prominent participants in this business of computer appliances. They will strive to be masters if not manufacturers of their own software. They will build their own operating systems and a widening variety of application programs as well.

THE NATURE OF SOFTWARE

The term "software," now in common everday usage, did not even appear in Webster's Unabridged Third New International Dictionary when it was published in 1961. It is perhaps not suprising that society would hesitate before accepting the name or even the idea of a form of information and intelligence that could not be read, understood, or made intelligible in the manner of the printed word, the standard for recorded knowledge.

In earlier days, there had been a tendency to speak of programs as literary works. This they clearly are not. The functions they perform and the purposes they serve are much more utilitarian and operational than literary. The use and usefulness of a program-its hallmarks-are not generally to be discerned from a reading of the code. In fact, the value of the program may not become apparent without extensive explanation, documentation, and first-hand experience in its operation.

Another difference between programs and literary works is the significance of copies. It is worth pointing out that one can use a program as one's own without copying it electronically. All one needs is ability to operate the program. A password allowing file access to another person's copy will do just fine. Assuming the owner has given approval, no law is broken by such use, ownership does not change hands, and no harm or modification occurs to the program.

On the other hand, copying is very easy and inexpensive with software, so easy and inexpensive that it seems futile and even counterproductive to attempt to prevent it. Society has been conditioned to think of the act of copying as a central issue in the effort to protect creative works. This may not (or should not) be so with software. The significance of copying must be rethought in the changed context of this nonprint electronic medium.

The set of instructions incorporated in software is an embodiment of basic ideas as well as an expression of specific elements and interconnections. For this reason, software protection has tended to fall between the cracks-between patents which cover new processes and ideas, and copyright which covers original expressions. Copyright has become a primary instrument for protecting software. Still, software is not well covered by copyright law at the present time despite the considerable accommodations made.

To some people, the simplest solution is not to bother protecting software at all. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Avoid the kinds of concentration and competitive advantage that the monopoly rights awarded by copyright foster. Promote free and universal access to software. Preserve ease of entry for new producers.

Despite their merit, these arguments tend to overlook certain realities. Protection is seen as necessary in the software business for two principal reasons. First, creativity is a very important resource of the business and should be encouraged. Such encouragement has traditionally taken the form of ample economic rewards. Second, the infrastructure of the software industry needs to be more fully devel