downloaded a variety of materials by using machines in our university's computer labs. I have little reason to believe that they ever check on the copyright status of the material they download. In general, questions of intellectual property simply don't appear on their radar screens. This attitude does not bode well for copyright holders. In particular, it does not encourage confidence in the enforceability of anti-piracy laws. Laws which don't have public opinion behind them are difficult to enforce. Laws on the books which don't fit with the laws of physics are even more dubious. It is these laws of physics, as they are embodied in countless pieces of modern technology, that I will discuss in the next section. Part 3: Technical RealitiesThe owners of intellectual property, quite understandably, are pursuing every course of action that they can find to maintain control over their "stock." They have turned to computer programmers and the like for answers. Have the technicians succeeded? Are they likely to? While trying to answer these questions, one could look at many different pieces of hardware and software, and read through a flood of details about what they are supposed to do. For the purposes of this relatively short paper, I will rely upon one source which I think summarizes much of the most relevant and interesting information in this area. In addition, this source reveals--sometimes unwittingly and indirectly--a few of the more intractable problems in the technological approaches to preserving intellectual property. In 1997, the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) released a document entitled "Intellectual Property Protection in Cyberspace: Towards a New Consensus *ipprotec.html*." The web-published piece begins with a message which is, in my opinion, generally correct: "When it comes to the Internet and government policy, the indecency issue has [recently] garnered the greatest attention. . . . However, over t...
