TESTIMONY OF FRED W. WEINGARTEN PROGRAM MANAGER, COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAM OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON COURTS, CIVIL LIBERTIES AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND COPYRIGHTS JULY 21, 1983 Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to appear before your Subcommittee today to discuss some of the fast-paced trends in information technology and to help you explore some of the implications of those trends for the legal system that seeks to protect intellectual property. I am I am the Program Manager for the Communication and Information Technologies (CIT) Program of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). a computer scientist by training and have spent many years examining the social impacts of information systems, as a college professor, as a Program Director with the National Science Foundation, and, now as OTA's Program Manager for Communication and Information Technologies. I must preface my remarks by pointing out that OTA has not performed a full assessment of information technology and copyright, per se. However, nearly all of the studies undertaken in the CIT Program require that we keep close tabs on technological trends. Hence, in the testimony today I can provide some technological background and raise some important questions and issues that this Subcommittee might consider exploring. A number of OTA studies have touched on the topic of copyright protection, and they have, on occasion, raised intellectual property issues that OTA regards as important and worthy of consideration by Congress. For example, in the report Computer-Based National Information Systems, OTA projected future developments in computer technology and developed a general overview of the relevant policy issues that would confront Congress over the next decade. Briefly discussing computer software protection, OTA concluded: "... the issue of computer software protection appears In the report Informational Technology and Its Impact on American Education, we looked to see whether the lack of adequate protection for computer software and data bases might be a barrier to the development of computer-based curriculum. OTA compared and evaluated the use of five basic types of protection: trade secrets, trademarks, patents, the law of unfair Each of these mechanisms appears to protect competition, and copyrights. How should software be protected, while recognizing the competing interests of groups who use software or benefit from its use? How can piracy and the various types of misappropriation of software be better dealt with? How can the incentives be increased for software innovation, TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS It has become common in the press and popular literature to speak about the new "Information Society" or "Information Age." Whether or not such statements suffer from journalistic exaggeration, we are clearly in the middle of a fundamental transformation of the way information is created, stored, transmitted, and used, not just in our own society, but world-wide. These changes are based on rapid technological advances in both computers and communications which have been brought about by progress in such fundamental areas as microelectronics, photonics, and satellites. These advances are providing us with a vast smorgasbord of new products and services. But change in technology, per se, is only part of the story. Along with technological innovation, we are experiencing changes in the way that technology is used and offered in the marketplace. These changes in industry structure may generate as many public policy issues particularly with - - respect to the area of intellectual property as does the technology itself. Both trends must be taken into account. I will concentrate on five areas of change that seem most relevant to the purposes of this Subcommittee: 2. The increasing storage and use of information in electronic form. After briefly describing these changes, I will outline some possible issues and policy questions to which these trends may give rise. Variety of Choice One way in which intellectual property has always been protected has been to keep it secret or to make it exclusive. Before the advent of public libraries, for example, often only scholars or other select groups of individuals had access to collections of books, documents, and manuscripts. Similarly, today in some cases, we limit access of information to those who own it or who can pay for it as in the case of proprietary information and commercial data bases. The increased availability and diversity of new information technologies will enhance public access to information. Thus the protection of some forms of intellectual property (may be undermined). Not so long ago, if we were average home or business consumers of information technology we had only a few choices open to us. For communication services, we had, what is referred to in the telephone community as POTS (for Plain Old Telephone Service). For video, we had a relatively few For audio, AM and FM radio, plus records channels of broadcast television. and magnetic tape were our choices. Computers were large, expensive beasts and there were relatively few in number (at least as compared with current figures). Now look at what is or will soon be happening. There are Under the stimulus of technology and deregulation, vendors are bringing to market a wide variety of specialized communication services. local networks for use within an office to tie together word processors, desktop computers, and mainframe computers. Specialized carriers are eginning to provide new media that compete with the telephone company's "local loop" of copper wire. Cellular radio offers low cost and widely available mobile telephone service. Two-way interactive cable, originally conceived of as a system to distribute television programming, is being adapted to provide data communication for business transactions. AT&T and its competitors are all developing new enhanced long distance services, based on satellites, fiber optics, or even an old fashioned microwave radio. By the next century, communications engineers see us as approaching what they refer to as an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), in which one can transmit information of any type (voice, video, facsimile, computer data) at high speed between any two points on earth all over an interconnected network. - A similar diversity also characterizes the computer market. Supercomputers, large mainframes, mini's, and desk-top or personal computers are all commercially available. At the smallest end of the scale, it become s hard for a consumer to even recognize that he or she is purchasing a computer microprocessors are now standard components of a myriad of products. The capability of these machines continue to grow rapidly with performance/cost ratios nearly doubling every two years. - For television watchers, traditional broadcasting is now being challenged by two-way cable, low power broadcast, direct broadcast satellites, multipoint distribution, video disks (both optical and capacitance), video cassettes and, in the future, high definition television. Audio technology is experiencing new competition. AM stereo is becoming available and an audio laser disk has recently been introduced to the market. We should not leave out of this list the advent of new technologies for the creation of video and audio programming. Computer graphics are coming of age as far as they are becoming increasingly cost-effective for commercial producers to invest in very large scale computer capacity to generate |