A

FINAL
NOTE

Restrictions on the use of software are far from uniform. You should check carefully each piece of software and the accompanying documentation yourself. In general, you do not have the right to:

1. receive and use unauthorized copies of software, or

2. make unauthorized copies of software for others.

If you have questions not answered by this brochure about the proper use and distribution of a software product, seek help from your computing office, from the software developer, or publisher.

EDITORIAL

How Can "Intellectual Property" Be "Protected?"

10

great debate, with higher education as a primary battleground, is just around the corner. The fraying fictions of patent and copyright law make it both necessary and unavoidable. The terms of engagement are set forth, in lucid and imaginative prose, in this issue of Change.

In every college and university, the two articles that follow should be read and pondered, not just by the legal adviser, the patent officer, and the library's copyright expert, but by the faculty's leading thinkers and the most reflective academic executives.

It's clear enough now that the rapid and pervasive spread of information around the world, reinforced by the myriad uses of everspeedier microprocessors hitched to ever-more-reliable telecommunications, has produced in the 1980s a qualitatively new state of affairs în every domain, from an individual's personal development to the puzzles of war

and peace.

Knowledge is becoming what physical labor, land, minerals, and energy used to be: the primary source of

wealth and power for each person,
cach organization, each society. The
difference is that the information from
which each of us makes knowledge
can be multiplied, diffused, and trans-
ported much more readily: it's harder
to hoard or to hide, and it's altogether
more accessible than the resources that
preceded it as the bases for human
civilization.

Moreover, since information cannot
be "owned" (only its assembly and
delivery service can), knowledge isn't
exchanged in a market but shared in a
kind of commons.

Colin Cherry, the British communi-
cation theorist, wrote it this way in an
unfinished manuscript shortly before
he died in 1979: "... the word com-
munication comes from the Latin:
communicare to share. It does not
mean 'sending messages,' for messages
cannot possibly be 'sent' in the sense
that we speak of sending goods or
commodities. Communication is
always a social activity, an act of
sharing."

The laws of patent and copyright
have tried for generations to sustain a
distinction between ideas and their ex-
pression, between information (the un-
varnished "facts") and its use in a

particular context. The distinction survived, not without controversy and complications, as long as print-onpaper was the primary means of delivery.

But courts, in their backwardlooking search for precedent, and legislatures, in their cautious attempts to solve problems that have already occurred, are no match for the mounting waves of digitized information, instant global communication, and insights about the future that are the sudden collective product of people who may never even have met in person. Laws about "copying" and doctrines like "fair use" wither in the new solar heat of openness. Efforts to use concepts left over from a print-oriented civilization to prevent information leakage resemble the futile struggle of the boy with his finger in the dike.

Five kinds of waves are rolling in. Dynamic information technologies keep producing new kinds of works (computer software); new means of delivery (compact disks, microfiche, videocassettes, computerized teletext, facsimile); new ways to assemble complex facts and ideas in more readily accessible form (computerized databases, electronic inventory controls, Change

May/June 1989