National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and the Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Emerging Information Infrastructure. The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age. National Academies Press, 2000. Accessed 28 February 2018, https://www.nap.edu/download/9601.
The Governing Board of the National Research Council approved the project that is the subject of this report. The authors bring to our attention how profoundly information access is affected by three technology trends: the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web, (and subsequent ubiquitous abundance of new media applications – video, audio, image, etc.), ‘over-abundance ‘of information in digital form and ubiquitous computer networks. They go on to lay out the perils and promises of our constantly evolving information infrastructure – and discuss the implications for both society and individuals, relating to both intellectual property (IP), that has been published in the traditional sense, and IP that ‘starts digital’.
What the authors realize and then explain is that the information infrastructure is blurring “the distinction between publication and private distribution.” The term information infrastructure covers all networked computers, systems and software used to present or send and receive information and any kind of ‘digital object’ over the Internet and the World Wide Web. The key differentiating aspects of this infrastructure are that it is “enabling, shared, open, socio-technical, heterogeneous, and [Sic has an] installed base.”
Access to such a revolutionary infrastructure calls into question the very concept of publication itself, which in turn has major policy implications. The authors discuss the value of public access to information and believe this value may be ‘undervalued’ in terms of social benefits – such as “an informed citizenry and the democratization of information and knowledge…Those benefits also have a significant and longer-term impact in encouraging the creation of new knowledge.”
The authors note that as more and more content gets ‘liberated’ from the traditional hardcopy medium of presentation, this causes significant challenges to:
Many long-held assumptions about copyrighted works, most notably those regarding the nature and character of publication. In the physical world publication is public, irrevocable, and provides a fixed copy of the work; in the digital world none of these may be true…Publication also implies a stability of the work. Copies distributed provide a stable snapshot of the work at a particular moment; subsequent editions only add to this record. In the digital world, however, documents published by being posted on the public Internet can be removed from scrutiny at the pleasure of the rights holder. Access can be controlled to allow many levels of dissemination between publication and private distribution, and older versions of a document can be (and are routinely) replaced by newer ones, obliterating any historical record.
In taking a close look at the impact of more and more digital information only being made available by license, the authors point out that this trend not only has the potential to adversely affect public access to information, but it also implies that digital information is ‘becoming a service rather than a product. The major danger here is that licensors do not have to incorporate ‘fair use’ policies that are embedded in copyright law; and technical protection mechanisms such as encryption technologies and other embedded permissions applications can significantly and adversely impact and even stop public access completely.
All this the authors point out, leads them to recommend that all stakeholders: “Representatives from government, rights holders, publishers, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions, the public, and technology providers should convene to begin a discussion of models for public access to information that are mutually workable in the context of the widespread use of licensing and technical protection services.”
The implications for digital discovery are significant – particularly as millennials and future generations are ‘digital natives’ in this new information infrastructure. What this translates into is how much more important inter-generational communication and contextualization of cultural objects is going to become in telling the story of the Holocaust.
