II. TECHNOLOGY The NII has the potential to be a robust and widely used medium for the creation, dissemination and use of information-based products and services. To realize this goal, the technical and security needs of users, service providers, carriers and content providers must be addressed. First, to be successful, the NII must deliver on its promise to facilitate the flow of information and information-based products and services to consumers. The easier it is for a consumer to retrieve, purchase or use an information product or service, the more likely it is that the consumer will do so. Second, content providers must have secure and reliable means for delivering information products and services to consumers. This means that content providers must be confident that the systems developed to distribute these works will be secure and that works placed on these systems will remain authentic and unaltered. If content providers cannot be assured that they will be able to realize a commercial gain from the sale and use of their products using the NII, they will have little incentive to use it. Third, service providers and carriers must be able to ensure that their systems which will serve as the physical infrastructure of the NII will address the needs of users and content providers. Technological solutions are playing and will continue to play a significant role in meeting these needs. A wide variety of new tools to facilitate access and use of Internetbased information products and services are being rapidly developed and deployed. Concurrently, copyright owners are developing and implementing technical solutions to facilitate the delivery of protected works in an easy, consumer-friendly yet reliable and secure way. These solutions enable copyright owners not only to protect their works against unauthorized access, reproduction, manipulation, distribution, performance or display, but also serve to assure the integrity of these works and to address copyright management and licensing concerns. A. CONTENT SECURITY AND USER ACCESS It is important to recognize that access needs of users of the NII have to be considered in context with the needs of copyright owners to ensure that their rights in their works are recognized and protected. One important factor is the extent to which the marketplace will tolerate measures that restrict access to or use of a copyrighted work. Conversely, without providing a secure environment where copyright owners can be assured that there will be some degree of control over who may access, retrieve and use a work, and, perhaps most importantly, how to effectuate limits on subsequent dissemination of that work without the copyright owner's consent, copyright owners will not make those works available through the NII.505 Technology can provide the solutions for these needs. Technological solutions exist today and improved means are being developed to better protect digital works through varying combinations of hardware and software. Protection schemes can be implemented at the level of the copyrighted work or at more comprehensive levels such as the operating system, the network or both. For example, technological solutions can be used to prevent or restrict access to a work; limit or control access to the source of a work; limit reproduction, adaptation, distribution, performance or display of the work; identify attribution and ownership of a work; and manage or facilitate copyright licensing. 505 For a detailed discussion of these and other applications of technology that may be used to provide protection for copyrighted works, see Symposium, Technological Strategies for Protecting Intellectual Property in the Networked Multimedia Environment, cosponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information, Harvard University, Interactive Multimedia Association, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (April 2-3, 1993); see also M. D. Goldberg & J. M. Feder, Copyright and Technology: The Analog, the Digital, and the Analogy, Symposium, WIPO Worldwide Symposium on the Impact of Digital Technology on Copyright and Neighboring Rights, 37 (March 31 - April 2, B. THE INTERNET EXPERIENCE In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the popularity and volume of use of the Internet. The Internet serves today, through electronic mail and remote access, to connect people to information and to deliver information products and services. An almost incomprehensible variety of information has been made widely and easily accessible through this system, originally designed to serve the needs of the Department of Defense in the 1960s. Because the Internet and applications which use it, like electronic mail and "World Wide Web," have exploded in popularity and use, systems used today and being designed for short term implementation are likely to serve as the foundation for communications through the NII. Indeed, in one very real sense, the Internet that is in use today is a prototype for the NII. Therefore, it is useful to discuss briefly the foundation of the Internet as it exists today. The Internet provides individuals many different ways to disseminate and retrieve information. The basic concept of communications underlying the Internet is that a user with his or her personal computer or workstation can "connect," either directly or through a succession of intermediary computers, in a uniform manner to a "remote" computer that acts as a "server" of information. The user attaches to the remote computer and uses the services offered by the remote computer system (hence the term "server" for the remote system). The service may provide for immediate transfer of information (e.g., file transfer) or eventual transmission (e.g., electronic mail). For example, a user can direct a remote computer to send data through an established connection to the user's computer. Alternatively, the user can send information to the remote computer that will eventually result in information being sent back to the user's computer from that remote computer. In either sense, there is a "connection" established between the two computers that permits the flow of information, typically at the request of the user. The simplest type of connections use a characterbased "dumb terminal" interface (e.g., characters alone are used to convey information to and from the user). This type of scheme consists essentially of the user using his computer to do nothing more than type commands which the computer executes. The 'controlled" computer executes the appropriate programs that handle location and transfer of data. One such scheme is the "telnet" protocol. Telnet uses a command line interface (e.g., one types commands) to initiate actions at the remote computer. Using telnet, a user can execute a program or routine on a remote computer to obtain a directory of files resident on that computer, navigate among directories of information, and transfer files. If a user wishes to simply retrieve information stored as a file on the remote server, he or she can execute a process on the remote computer termed "file transfer protocol" or ftp. This is the most basic form of transfer; one simply instructs the remote computer to send to a specific file resident on the remote computer to the requester's computer. A menu driven interface and service for retrieving files from remote servers was subsequently developed by the University of Minnesota. This scheme, termed "gopher," relies on established directories of information that are consolidated at specific sites on the Internet. The requester uses his or her computer to instruct the remote computer to execute the gopher program, which then establishes a connection to a directory server (e.g., a "gopher server"). The gopher server will provide the requesting user easily navigable listings of files that can be retrieved from the gopher server. The gopher server acts more or less as a conduit for identifying a specific file and delivering it to the requesting computer. Other schemes have been established for searching pre-established indices of information about information resources on the Internet. Examples include "Archie," "Veronica" and the Wide Area Information Search (WAIS).50% All of these examples were originally developed as UNIX-implemented programs to perform file transferrelated tasks; namely, searching and retrieval of information about either the location of remote servers with certain types of information or of remote servers that had specific files. The information sent back to the user with these tools consists of information about these servers that can then be used with the other tools (e.g., ftp or gopher) to retrieve a specific file. There are now more sophisticated tools for users to access and retrieve information on remote servers on the Internet. These tools typically are programs that implement the common UNIX-based protocols but which actually run on the user's personal computer or workstation. Thus, once a connection to an appropriate "Internet provider" is established, a user may start a program on his personal computer that acts as a "gopher client." The "gopher client" will permit the user to retrieve information from a remote server directly to his or her personal computer. Connections between the user's personal computer and the "Internet provider" to carry these. communications can be established using a "dial-up" or analog phone connection using an appropriate communication protocol or a link over a link over a digital transmission line. The most significant benefit of these tools is that they are typically based on a graphical interface, which makes it easier for the user to manage the connection and interact with remote servers. Many of the established protocols have been integrated and enhanced using tools that can access what is termed the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (Web) is a scheme whereby organizations use graphical 506 Archie is a service which provides directories of repositories of gopher servers; Veronica provides indices of documents which contain key words. |