Early reliance on copy protection led to the subliminal notion that cracking into a software package somehow “earned” one the right to use it. Limited not by conscience but by technical skill, many soon felt free to do whatever they could get away with. This will continue to be a potential liability of the encryption of digitized commerce.
As intellectual property rights continue to grow in importance in the information age, intellectual property audits should become a more and more vital tool.
Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.
There will be a different kind of literacy based on a melange of digital information – the entire stream of all the things that flows into our mind from our computers.
Perhaps, some like to venture, the new technologies will give rise to a new kind of literacy in which a literate person will be expected to be at least as familiar with great issues, melodies and rhythms as with great words … Some experts believe the next stage of the information revolution will be so cataclysmic that new forms of literacy will emerge.
In the future everyone will be able to contribute their useful bit.
In the next decade, electronic mail is dead.
With the coming of fiber-optics and faster computers, bandwidth will multiply, leading to the spread of multimedia technologies like digital video, audio and video teleconferencing. People who like to type at each other may again become like an endangered species as society sees the decline of textual literacy a second time.
A workable national network might include the following features: Built and managed by private enterprise. Federal start-up subsidies for colleges, universities, libraries and schools. First Amendment free-speech guarantees. Guaranteed interconnection to other data services offered by telephone companies and other locally regulated businesses. Guaranteed universal digital access for everyone who wants to connect. Fair rates and policies subject to regulatory review.
There is no assurance that one-size-network fits all. Some important public policy choices will therefore be made, one way or the other.