Question

5. The traditional protections offered by intellectual property law seem powerless to deal with many of the issues raised by digital media illustrating the impact of digital technology on the management of intellectual property.

Answer 1

The evolution of technology is challenging the status quo of IP management in many ways.

A number of general points are important to keep in mind about TPSs:

• Technology provides means, not ends; it can assist in enforcing IP policy, but it cannot provide answers to social, legal, and economic questions about the ownership of and rights over works, nor can it make up for incompletely or badly answered questions.

• No TPS can protect perfectly. Technology changes rapidly, making previously secure systems progressively less secure. Social environments also change, with the defeat of security systems attracting more (or less) interest in the population. Just as in physical security systems, there are inherent trade-offs between the engineering design and implementation quality of a system on the one hand and the cost of building and deploying it on the other. The best that can be hoped for is steady improvement in TPS quality and affordability and keeping a step ahead of these bent on defeating the systems.

Note that the phrase "technical protection services" is used deliberately. Although it is tempting to talk about technical protection systems—packages of tools integrated into digital environments and integrated with each other—the committee believes that such systems are difficult to implement reasonably in the information infrastructure, an open network of interacting components, lacking boundaries that usefully separate inside and outside. In this environment it is better to talk about technical protection services; services; each service will be drawn on by information infrastructure components and will generally interact with other services.