is on a web site, email this to all your friends and relatives. As I said at the beginning, the only limits are the laws of physics and the extent of your imagination. "All right," you may say. "You, the author but non-owner of this essay, have made a choice. Fine for you, perhaps. But where will everyone wind up in the long run? What is going to happen to copyrights and everything else as the technology changes?" A reasonable question, and a difficult one. We can return here to Mann: Large sums of money are indeed at stake, and change certainly seems inevitable. But there is a great deal of reluctance to recognize that change. The "serene, glassy-eyed denial" which Barlow described is widespread, and many people find it far too easy to maintain. The denial is built primarily around belief in the perpetual maintenance, and the further development, of three things: Voluntary cooperation by the general public; Punishment of those who don't voluntarily cooperate--in other words, the belief that the "stern warnings to the passengers," as Barlow described them above, can actually be backed up by fines and prison terms; and Technological fixes for all the problems. Why don't I think that any or all of these things will preserve intellectual property as we have known it? The next two portions of this paper answer that question. Since I believe that voluntary cooperation and legal enforcement are closely related, I will discuss them together. Technological fixes will get a section of their own. Part 2: Useful Arts?Can current laws governing intellectual property survive the onslaught of technology? Do they deserve to? How do we decide? If current intellectual property law is a coherent structure, with clearly agreed-upon goals and clear ways of reaching those goals, then the system might have some chance of surviving. But just how clear and coherent is it? Let's go back to the early roots of intellectual property in American constitutional law....
