The turbulence about these questions is nicely brought out in the dispute about such things as the rights to reproduce video and the rights to reproduce print. I think the industry is taking a grubby, traditional short-term economic selfinterest position-take the money today and forget about the future.

If one has a view that says American society is increasingly going to be permeated by this new information technology, if one recognizes that technology is central to the economy and intrinsically democratizing in its political implications, one should frame legislation which promotes the freest and most open exchange of information and let the short-term issues be treated as short-term transition questions.

This notion of taxing the tape or taxing the machine is just the most narrow kind of short-term self-interest inhibiting the greater public good.

You have the same thing in the scientific community in which the scientific publishers have already proliferated an absolutely asinine system of rights and access and payback. To the best of my knowledge it has not constrained anybody from reproducing an article and probably has a general effect of degrading respect for the law.

Technology is also affecting language. Hardware, software, micro, modem, bytes, bits, mouse, light pen-these and other terms are coming into the language at a great rate. But more important than vocabulary, the structure of the language, the grammar, is changing. Such things as graphics are creating new modes of knowledge, new ways of looking at things. It is rather clear that this new technology will shape the very way we think. We must be sure that in protecting interests that we stimulate new thinking, not thwart it.

Science is creating interesting new basic questions of legal categorization. The fundamental principle of genetic science, molecular biology, is that the genes which code the structure of every living organism are an information code. If you are concerned with information, the interesting question of the following sort comes up: Let's say we create in the laboratory a new organism that has commercially desirable characteristics.

One way to look at it is that the organism is merely a specific embodiment of a code in the same way that a published book is a specific embodiment of an author's manuscript. Maybe it should be protected under something like copyright. On the other hand, the way the law is now going it is embodied as a composition of matter and protected under patents.

To try to force that discussion in either of those categories is not productive. What one has to do is have an image of the future of society and frame the legislation to optimize on what we want the future to be like.

One of the implications of this point is that legislation which has an old law and a new law element to it might be very important in the future. Certain things could be protected by the past law and new developments protected under new legislation.

Technologically, there are interesting things coming along that may modify some of our preconceptions rather sharply. Encryption technology, for example, the ability to encode very complex materi

But it you try to anticipate what is going to happen, I think you will be back here every 3 or 4 years having these hearings and asking, "What do we do now?" Every 5 years you will be out of date.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. Then your advice is to respond to these questions as they arise, but not wait too long?

Mr. COMPAINE. It is not easy-I am not trying to minimize the gravity of this. In general, I think, yes. You have to wait and respond to real problems, recognizing in the short term there may be some confusion and a few inequities. But I think that is probably the safer and in the long term, more socially beneficial way than trying to figure out what is going to happen in this area.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. I think I have used up my time. I thank you and I yield to the gentleman from California, Mr. Moorhead. Mr. MOORHEAD. Thank you.

Don't you have pretty much the same problems in determining computer materials that you have at the present time? If you have a book or a study that comes out that is copyrighted and you issue a book report or a synopsis of it, you really are subject to the copyright laws. You talk about using an abstract, a longer article on the computer, and copying that. Don't you basically have the same old problems? If it is just a review you probably are not in any trouble but if it is for all intents and purposes copying the original article in a summary form that you do have problems.

Mr. COMPAINE. The problem is if I write a review of something, or an abstract of something, presumably I could copyright it. But if you then publish the same review, word for word, someone would say you have violated my copyright. But if two publishers published the same word-for-word piece, because they both bought the same computer program which generated the review, how do you determine that one of those is protected and another is an unfair copy? They both used the same computer program.

It gets more complex. How do you copyright a data base, an electronic computer stored data base when that data base is perhaps being updated every minute, and it is constantly changing?

Mr. MOORHEAD. You talk in here about copying in the home. Now, you know there is legislation pending that would put an extra charge on the blank tape that is sold for a person's own use. If that bill is passed it would be legal to copy the materials that came in as long as you only used it for your own personal use and didn't sell it.

Mr. COMPAINE. I don't want to get involved in that specific piece. Mr. MOORHEAD. We are involved with the specifics and not just the abstract.

Mr. COMPAINE. That's right. That's why you are sitting there and I am here.

I think that it gets much more difficult when we talk about the computer side of things because you start putting things in digitized forms and it is almost uncontrollable for you to prevent me from copying a floppy disc, especially with hackers around who can break any code and sell them.

You can say, OK, we will put a 25-cent fee on every floppy disc that gets sold. The idea then is that you cannot enforce who controls the actual information itself. We are moving the control of in

formation from the centralized printers and distributors out to the millions of homes and offices, each of whom can manipulate and change that information with virtually no outside control on it.

Mr. MOORHEAD. But that is true to a great extent with books that are published. They are put out and people make abstracts of the book and they pull materials out of it but it is still floating around. Mr. COMPAINE. Very true, but it is very hard to reprint that whole book. It is very expensive to literally reprint that book, especially in a form that makes it look just like the original book. If I want to reproduce a textbook and do it in four colors and do the same type style, it is very expensive, and it is much easier to trace if someone should try to reprint copies without permission.

If that same book is downloaded onto my floppy disc or computer main frame memory, I can duplicate that and transmit it around at virtually no cost.

Mr. MOORHEAD. I want to thank you for getting us thinking about some of these many problems that are ahead of us. Obviously, we are going to be dependent to some extent on how the courts come down on these things and we are going to have to set some of the policy ourselves here in the Congress. But we will certainly be very interested in some of the answers that you may have to our problems as we move forward, and the help that you can, perhaps, give us.

Thank you.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. The gentleman from Kentucky.
Mr. MAZZOLI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me first commend the chairman of our subcommittee for calling this whole series of hearings. I think it could well yield some information and some ideas for the future for ourselves and I thank the gentleman for putting himself out.

Let me thank you, too, Doctor, for your statements. I was particularly struck by the way you said that it is really a swamp out there. I am beginning to think of some kind of a dank forest, if you take a wrong step you will get sucked up by quicksand.

It really is, I think, both a legalistic as well as a technological swamp out there and somehow we have to navigate that swamp, hopefully, without being swallowed up by the quicksand pits there.

Let me ask you, also, you said in answer to a question from our chairman that you didn't think that we could anticipate all of this because it is a real swamp out there and that we should respond but don't wait too long in responding and let the court be the tripwire.

Isn't that really just stating what the state of today is?
Mr. COMPAINE. I'm sorry, isn't--

Mr. Mazzoli. Isn't that in a sense saying where we are today and yet we are trying to have this series of hearings to let us get into tomorrow in perhaps a little different posture than we have faced the problems today?

Mr. COMPAINE. I guess what I am suggesting-I agree that these hearings are the right thing to do. As you go through this there are all sorts of interests out there, as you well know, and if you get too specific in what you come up with, such as a 50-cent tax on something called a video tape. Then what happens if, 15 or 20 years from now instead of video tape everything is digitized and stored in

the computer and you don't have to have a physical piece to put in your recorder? It may be that the specificity of that legislation or regulation can be gotten around because of some superseding technology that comes faster than we thought or that we had anticipated.

So that whatever you come up with has to be couched in such general ways that it embodies principles rather than too many specifics.

Mr. MAZZOLI. Actually, I thought that what we tried to do in setting up the Copyright Royalty Tribunal was to make it sort of general but the minute they put a specific dollar figure to the use of so many channels, immediately then everybody moves to wipe out their activity by saying that they went too far or didn't go far enough.

Whether we try to make it so specific as to cite every dollar-andcent figure, or every percentage figure, or when we set up a general apparatus which would then react to specific situations, it seems we are still condemned and we still don't handle it right.

Mr. COMPAINE. That is why I said this is a swamp. And I don't think the problem is going to go away in this session or the next session of Congress. In fact, I think copyright and the whole notion of what is intellectual property and how does it get protected might be one of the major issues through the end of this century.

I really think it is complex enough that we are going to have to live with it for a long time. I wish I had something more optimistic for you but I don't see it that way.

Mr. Mazzoli. Thank you. I appreciate your candor. I guess that is really why I believe we are here today, to try to figure out if there is any way to anticipate the future. And I don't think we can anticipate it technologically because there are basement tinkerers and backyard inventors right now doing their number which is going to make obsolete everything which is now state of the art. We never could, and probably never should, try to anticipate what they are going to move. But I guess with the hearings we are trying to figure out if there are certain guideposts or immutable truths that we could somehow incorporate into law which would then more or less guide us into the future without limiting these inventors in this kind of initiative. And at the same time, without putting the creative community totally to this posture of just being picked to death by a school of piranha fish where they would have nothing left of their own creative abilities, so I guess we are going to be faced with that.

Thank you very much, Doctor, for this opening presentation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. The gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Sawyer.
Mr. SAWYER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think you correctly described it when you said it was kind of a swamp. Since I have been in Congress, I have never gotten involved in anything that was more complex and more defying of an intelligent solution that satisfied all of the questions. I finally settled down to kind of a simplistic view which suits me well and that is get rid of the whole machinery. And let the people with the problems go out and work out their own solutions.

You have the competing interests, as you are well aware, of the producers of the programs, the broadcasters, cable, satellites, not to mention professional sports and Ted Turner, and a few other lateral problems.

Ôn difficult questions Congress tends to wait until some kind of a consensus or at least an appearance of a consensus just begins to become visible rather than to jump into the fray without letting it settle itself. But whenever we do that the courts step in then and decide the whole issue and then we complain that the courts are being too activist. I don't know what the answer is.

We are doing that right now with the Betamax problem, as you are probably aware. It really is a congressional problem. It is not a constitutional problem. It is a question of really making a law on what we are going to do with that. I guess they are getting a little befuddled by it, too.

It just seems to me if we follow the policy of waiting it out and letting the courts be the tripwire, they end up disposing of the whole thing and in effect legislate it.

Mr. COMPAINE. You can always come back and legislate. My point was that you let the courts make a few moves and that helps create greater consensus or contention and then Congress can decide when it wants to make the move to settle things. But you have to let the courts start that process.

I think you are also very right that much of this has to be settled by the contending forces out there, to come up with some agreements that they can all live with. And we see how difficult that has been up to now.

Mr. SAWYER. This Betamax, and I suppose audio recording is even more critical a problem since there are some 98 million audio recorders out there and there's only about a million, not quite a million, video recorders out there. So they have got very similar problems.

Of course, then you are trespassing in everybody's living room regarding what they have got the right to do and not the right to do.

I appreciate the chairman calling these hearings, because I need any help I can get in this area. Every time you think you have got something kind of worked out either there is a change in technology or something else that undoes it.

Again, I want to express my appreciation to the chairman, too. Thank you. I yield back.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. The gentlewoman from Colorado.

Mrs. SCHROEDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am sorry I missed the testimony. There are too many hearings going on at once.

I just wanted to make sure that I understood the thrust. The thrust was to hold off for a while because technology is changing so rapidly and maybe allow the people who are inventing this stuff to find ways to keep it from being copyrighted, and so forth?

Mr. COMPAINE. Generally, I would say it is such a rapidly changing area that the principle of copyright itself, based on printing technology and centralized production, may have to be rethought; that what computers can do to information-digitized information--changes the locus of control and the method of control.