ftware, Hardware, Hard Facts, Hard ChoicesAs I look back over the earlier portions of this essay, I realize how much I have omitted from my description of this huge universe called "intellectual property." There are so many more things that I could include, if time and space permitted. For example, I could include the words of Nicholas Negroponte Professor of Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Founding Director of the Media Lab at MIT: "Copyright law is totally out of date. It is a Gutenberg artifact. Since it is a reactive process, it will probably have to break down completely before it is corrected" (58). I could include some more words from the book by John Pavlik that I mentioned above, New Media Technology: Earlier generations of technology, including the photocopying machine and audiotape recorders, have presented challenges to existing copyright law, but none have posed the same threat as the digital age. Earlier technologies, although they may sometimes have made copying copyrighted material possible, did not have the copying advantages of digital technologies, which make instantaneous mass copying of exact duplicates on an international scale a matter as simple as pressing the Enter key. (286)I could include excerpts from the debates that have taken place on the floor of both houses of Congress as they have wrestled with these issues; excerpts from a slew of court decisions; excerpts from analyses by a variety of legal scholars; excerpts from the long-running, and still ongoing, arguments over "fair use;" and on and on and on. But this essay, originally written for a college class, had to stay under twenty pages, not surpass twenty million; and this essay had to be completed within a few weeks, not be spread out several decades. So I must limit myself to just a few brief concluding remarks and recommendations. In order to work our way out of the "muddle" that Charles Mann described, we need to mo...
