Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 27, 2002|Volume 31, Number 4

Lecturer speaks about newest issues
in field of information technology

The debate about copyright issues and digital content is divided into two distinct camps -- those who believe there should be free access for all or those who favor tight control -- and the latter camp appears to be winning, business executive Robert Lucky said in a lecture in Davies Auditorium on Sept. 17.

"The recording industry, the publishing industry and the movie industry are fighting to retain economic boundaries," said Lucky, corporate vice president of applied research at Telcordia Technologies. "These people have terrific power. They have star power. They have money power."

The issue of copyrights is "one of the most daunting social issues today," Lucky said in the latest of the Yale Engineering Sesquicentennial Distinguished Lecture Series. "The world could really part in two different
directions."

Lucky, who formerly was executive director of the communications sciences research division at Bell Labs, gave a broad overview of information technology (IT) as a cultural phenomena, discussing such issues as its staying power and whether digital content should be in the public domain.

Early in his career Lucky invented the adaptive equalizer, which is a key enabler for high-speed data modems today. He is the author of a textbook, "Principles of Data Communications," a popularized science book, "Silicon Dreams," and a book of essays titled "Lucky Strikes Again." The essays were collected from the "Reflections" columns he has written regularly for the IEEE Spectrum Magazine since 1982, containing humorous and philosophical observations about technology and the profession. He has received many honors, among them the prestigious Marconi Prize.

In his address at Yale, titled "Reflections on the Nature of Information Technology and Its Role in Society," Lucky said the copyright issue features Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, on one side, and the publishing, entertainment and recording industries on the other. Lessig warns that copyright law has expanded to control what have traditionally been unregulated uses, such as loaning a book to a friend and reading a book aloud, neither of which are permitted with E-books under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Those who agree with Lessig adopt the stance that whatever features are added to digital content that makes it uncopyable can be altered to make the content available to everyone.

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, sponsored by Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-South Carolina) reflects the opinions of those on the other side of the debate. The bill would prohibit the sale or distribution of nearly any kind of electronic device, unless that device includes copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government.

Another related proposal sponsored by Representatives Howard Berman, (D-California) and Howard Coble, (R-North Carolina) would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place. The legislation would immunize groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a publicly accessible peer-to-peer network.

On the fringes, Lucky said, are those software engineers dedicated to providing free software, such as The Open Source Initiative. The basic idea behind Open Source is that when programmers can read, redistribute and modify the source code for a piece of software the software evolves and improves at a speed that is much faster than conventional software development.

Another interesting IT phenomenon, Lucky said, is the Internet Archive, which is copying the entire Web every day. Like a paper library, free access is provided to researchers, historians, scholars and the general public. Those responsible for compiling the Internet Archive believe it is a new medium of major historical significance and thus should not be allowed to disappear into oblivion.

Lucky mused in his talk about whether IT itself would go the way of the transcontinental railroad. He showed a slide illustrating the driving of the Golden Spike on May 10, 1869, as the Union Pacific railroad tracks joined those of the Central Pacific Railroad. The next more current slide showed the same spot -- the track now a dusty, empty trail in Promontory, Utah.

Lucky said the globe today is divided into the world of atoms, illustrated by the train, and the world of bits, illustrated by a box of Microsoft software. "Today, everyone works like this, at computers," he said, showing a photograph of two people sitting in a common office cubicle staring away from each other into separate computer monitors. "This can't be the end of human evolution."

He traced the development of IT, beginning with Claude Elwood Shannon, a mathematician who laid the foundation of modern information theory while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s. Shannon calculated that there was a limit to the capacity of information that could be sent with a zero probability of error. Lucky said that capacity was reached about five or six years ago.

After Shannon there followed the emergence of two IT "laws" that remain valid to this day -- Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law, Lucky told his audience. Moore's Law was an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months.

Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3M Corporation and designer of the Ethernet protocol for computer networks, stated in his Metcalfe's Law that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. In other words, until a critical mass of users is reached, a change in technology only affects the technology. But once critical mass is attained, social, political, and economic systems change. The Internet reached critical mass in 1993, when there were roughly 2.5 million host computers on the network, Lucky said.

Lucky closed his talk by quoting David Brin, author of "The Transparent Society," in which Brin predicted an act such as the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers by terrorists would usher in a new era of government surveillance. Trying to prevent the surveillance is pointless, Brin maintains. Rather, he asserts, it is much better to seek oversight to watch the watchers. Brin's viewpoint is at odds with those who want to maintain privacy.

"What happens when everything is seen and recorded?" Lucky asked his audience. "Now we can know where everyone is. What will we be trading off in privacy to control terrorism?"

-- By Jacqueline Weaver

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