Forget for the moment about the jargon-laden work of wiring the world with its TCP/IP and ATM and X.500. The key questions for the information society are about the information we will get and how it is produced. Mike Holderness proposes that secure rights for authors and creators are vital to a free market in information.

Summary:

• Ex Cathedra (Out of the Cathedral onto the net) The net marks as big a change in human comunication as that from pulpit to printing-press. That doesn't mean we know quite what the change will be... but it can include:
• Many-to-many publishing ... if, that is, the content that's smart enough to draw people in isn't monopolised by the Disneys of this world.
• Paying the Blues Creators have been ripped off for ever. The point of copyright and authors' rights was to get away from patronage and allow independent work... do we have to go backwards?
• The net can reveal the Invisible Hand Free market? What free market? It's nothing like a free market unless it has a large number of independent players.
• Can you believe your eyes? Fact is fickle in the eletronic media. Who takes responsibility for verifying that a photo, for example, shows something that happened in the Real World? Would you prefer it was Rupert Murdoch or the photographer?
• Danger! Lawyers ahead! US and UK publishers, naturally, want to monopolise ownership and control of content. But, once you look outside the English-speaking world, their legal foundation is shaky at best. Dear Messrs Gates, Murdoch, &co: please take care... we can discuss this civilly now, or go to court later.

The 1995 G7 summit on the Global Information Infrastructure laboured mightily, and proclaimed (to a general lack of astonishment) that open markets in telecommunications are the answer. But, while the nature of the market in data transport affects how many services can be delivered at what price, the nature of the market in services affects the direction of a significant chunk of human culture.

The legal and market framework for the provision of services on what we'll call the Infobahn is, at best, shaky. A model for a genuinely free market in information does, however, exist: and it is to be found in the mainland European concept of "authors' rights". Developing this model for the Infobahn will encourage an outpouring of enterprise and creativity. Attempts to patch up what the French disparagingly refer to as "the Anglo-Saxon model" of copyright risk embedding distortions in the market and impoverishing the culture.

Does it seem presumptuous to speak so grandly of the future of culture? The argument in question takes place, after all, mostly among that minority of a minority who read both computer manuals and copyright statute - and do so because they find them interesting. The debate, clearly, will need an extended introduction.

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Ex Cathedra (Out of the Cathedral onto the net)

After Gutenberg, there was publishing. One person's ideas and creativity could reach everyone (everyone, at least, who was literate in the same language), as fast as horses could gallop.

Immediately, the monopoly previously held by religion on the mass dissemination of ideas was broken. William Tyndale was executed for publishing the New Testament in the vernacular; but Protestantism, based on an individual's reading, was made possible all the same. Science, too, became possible, with an entirely new conception of truth arrived at through informed critique of texts by the author's peers. The works of the classical Authorities, often translated by rabbis from the Arabic scholarly texts which preserved the lost originals, became available to a large critical audience.

It would be extreme to claim that the "Gutenberg revolution" was sufficient cause for all this; but it was necessary.

Radio and television expanded the means of expression and warp-shifted publishing from the Night Mail train to the limit, the speed of light. But they are, even more than paper publishing, one-to-many media.

The coming revolution is an effect of the much-hyped Infobahn. But the Infobahn is a means of transport, under construction. We can no more predict its exact effects than the people who laid the first iron rails between Stockton and Darlington in England's industrial North-East could know that they were inventing summer holidays, commuter suburbs and daily national newspapers.

We do know some of the differences between the Infobahn and other means of transporting information. The crucial point is that it is fundamentally a network, not a hierarchy, offering the possibility of widespread "many-to-many" communication of ideas.

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Many-to-many publishing

Then forget about the "local": everyone who has the money and inclination to travel the Infobahn is in the same place. Then make it a TV station as well as a newspaper.

The geometry of the Infobahn does not fully determine the nature of its traffic, any more than the geometry of a railway network fully determines the intentions of its users. That is a matter of human effort and creativity. Oh, and commerce.

Commerce requires legal frameworks to define the rights and responsibilities of those who trade. Existing legal frameworks get into serious trouble when they collide with the nascent Infobahn.

The response of English, and US, law to the Gutenberg revolution was to protect the ownership of a copy of creative work: the underlying concept is of books, and the right to reproduce them as further physical objects, as commodities. As John Perry Barlow memorably puts it, the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition protects "the bottles and not the wine".

Entrepreneurs have reacted, logically enough, by trying to corner various markets in "wine". Bill Gates of Microsoft tried to buy all electronic reproduction rights to the contents of the Louvre, and other museums, out of his personal fortune. In the UK, in December four major publishers sought to convince freelance contributors that their work was henceforth open to unlimited exploitation (in one case, "throughout the Universe") without further payment.

But they don't plan to sell information on the "one payment, unlimited use" plan. The word on the street is that the Microsoft Network on-line service ("BillNet") will soon charge users for the specific information they retrieve or use. So each time you read this article on BillNet, you pay a few pennies; but the author has to make do with a flat fee.

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Paying the Blues

On the Internet, with its academic roots, there is a widespread belief that "information wants to be free". The fact that when you copy electronic information you deprive the owner of no physical object encourages this. Carefully refined and presented information requires intense effort, whether you're talking about the difference between a biotechnology research paper and a comprehensible report an investor can use, or between a do-it-yourself video of your local bar and Casablanca. It seems to be fairly widely agreed these days that effort is encouraged by reward.

John Perry Barlow proposes that the correct model for rewarding effort on the Infobahn should be performance, rather than publication. This position has attractions - but leaves creators struggling with an ill-adapted legal framework.

There is, however, a ready-made answer. Whereas Anglo-Saxon law reacted to the invention of publishing by protecting the book, in mainland Europe - especially in France - the focus is on the author. As English barrister (attorney) Alistair Kelman puts it: in French law, what you create "is part of your soul". You can no more sell rights in it than you can legally sell yourself into slavery. You may license others to reproduce it: in a sense, especially for multi- media works, to perform it.

The difference between copyright and authors' rights is as basic as that between a bricklayer working on a public housing project, and an entrepreneurial builder constructing houses to let. The former is paid, once only, to carry out others' grand plans - too often resulting in the blocks being blown up in a inner city area near you. The latter can innovate, take risks , and make mistakes on a small scale or recoup the investment over time.

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The net can reveal the Invisible Hand

Here we could have a really interesting argument in theoretical economics about the notion of "increasing returns" in a high-technology market. But we would probably do better to leave the theoreticians to sort themselves out later, and observe now what does happen in such markets. Near-monopolies such as Microsoft and Intel are prominent.

The first product to gain significant market share is well on the path to dominance, almost regardless of its merits. High-quality publishing on the Infobahn is another market where start-up costs are high and production costs are negligible. Large parts of the start-up cost, though, have been met from the public purse. US readers will recognise an analogy to the robber-baron railroad companies, kick-started by grants of public land.

Those who really believe in the Market are going to have to support legal frameworks which at least permit challenges to monopoly.

It seems probable that the notorious convergence between communications and media will produce something much like the movie business. The price of entry at the top is now beyond the means of entire nation-states' economies. Investment can, however, be recouped through profit-share schemes, deferring income until the tickets are sold - which is the origin of most of the exciting, experimental cinema on which Hollywood feeds.

For we are not talking here simply of the Internet and its torrent of chatter - the last bastion of the text, with an entry cost at around $15,000 for a rather smart publishing operation. We are not talking about movies-on-demand, endlessly recycling old software with the only change that - advertisers quake in your boots - movies-on-demand offer that couch-potato's Nirvana of being able to fast-forward through the boring bits of broadcast television.

We are talking about entirely new forms of cultural expression. The possibility exists, for example, of producing interactive movies beside which today's linear, pre-determined and over-determined movie will have the thrill, entertainment and engrossment value of an embroidered "Home Sweet Home" sampler.

The people who show and tell stories, the creators - authors, photographers, journalists, film and newspaper editors and weird hybrids which do not yet have names - are at least as much a part of this as are the software genii and the meticulous magicians of silicon. They will only be able to innovate as entrepreneurs if they can take a risk on recouping their investment, as the "tickets" to view their product are sold.

The publishers, in a bit of a panic, prefer to buy the creators' work outright. The unintended effect is to stifle innovation, and the perhaps-not-entirely-consciously- intended effect is to promote monopoly and ogliopoly. Exploited creators do, of course, still innovate: but jazz musicians, say, invest only in their instruments, their time and their souls.

If Muddy Waters had been a French blues-man, he would have been rich. Indeed, Renoir's experience, mentioned above, inspired the extension of the law on author's rights to include, in 1920, a "droit de suite": whenever a work is re-sold, 3% of the proceeds go to the creator.

This is not to say that the French model can or should be adopted wholesale. For example, it gives creators the right to withdraw, or "un-publish" their work - something to drive American archivists crazy, and probably infeasible on the Infobahn. Nor is it a panacea: however creators are recompensed, for example, any pay-on-demand model absolutely requires free public access through libraries, with Public Reading Right, as insurance against the effects of creating an information underclass.

Authors' rights do, however, provide a viable model for the economics of pay-on-demand information, such as that promised by BillNet. Once the principle is agreed and implemented, the overhead involved in dropping one penny into my account, every time you pay the publisher two pennies to read the electronic version of this, is measured in hundredths of a penny.

That last sentence makes clear the self-interest in this argument. But this is more than special pleading by writers and photographers and other creators: because creators have responsibilities too.

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Can you believe your eyes?

In the end, the question is: who is responsible for the veracity of a photograph? The obvious candidate would seem to be the photographer, able to put her hand on her heart and testify "I was there, and this photo records what I saw."

What is at stake is no less than the credibility of the media. Undetectable and unaccountable manipulation of photographs and sounds creates "virtual reality news". Democracy itself depends upon a thoroughly and reliably- informed electorate. To attempt to impose a legal duty of veracity on publishers introduces control of the press by the judiciary. Give photographers and other creators the right to object, expensively, to abuse of their work, and the job is done without invoking the spectre of state control.

Present UK law gives creators the author's right to object to "derogatory treatment". It had to, to allow the country to sign the Berne Convention on intellectual property rights: the US and UK are out of step with the rest of the world. Then the UK law-makers took the right away for all purposes relating to news-gathering.

The effect of this is that, as the law stands, a photograph taken by a French citizen is more trustworthy than one taken by a British citizen. In the event that a French picture is digitally manipulated, photographers can exercise their inalienable moral right to the integrity of their work. British news photographers have no such right.

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Danger! Lawyers ahead!

There is an argument that in this and similar respects UK law breaches the European Convention on Human Rights. A group of creators is in the first stages of testing this in Strasbourg.

Publishers, broadcasters and distributors who base their business plans on current US and UK law should think very carefully about what they will do when the legal rug is pulled from under them: and such companies as Time Inc and the Information Access Company show signs of doing so. Anyone developing software for the Infobahn should be sure to build in author identification measures to track ownership and responsibility. Such measures will also be required to deal with the question of legal responsibility - while accepting that hackers will and should find ways of publishing in perfect anonymity so that, for example, news from within repressive regimes can safely be spread.

We are, remember, talking about an unprecedented development in human culture: the possibility of instant, many-to-many communication. It's not surprising that the debate transcends traditional political divides. Already you'll find Speaker Gingrich of the US House of Representatives, and the Berkeley-based group Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (originally formed to destroy Star Wars by ridicule), bemusedly in agreement on some matters. Such confusion is often the sign of impending creativity: let us hope that it is so now.

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Thanks for helpful commentary are due to John Perry Barlow, Prof. Dorothy Denning, Prof. Cheris Kramerae, Pippa Holloway, Fran Sendbuehler, Evan Kirchhoff and Brad Cleveland.