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and then gave them away to the community at large, is fading in the rush to cash in. A Supreme Court decision in 1981 opened the way for patenting software (in Europe, software is generally protected by copyright instead), creating problems in deciding what elements of a product may be copied for the purpose of making it intuitive for users who are used to specific conventions.

Opposition to this way of managing the software industry led to the formation of the Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom, set up specifically to continue the tradition of creating free, high-quality software for widespread use. John Gilmore, whose name pops up in so many other contexts, was involved in setting up Cygnus Support, a company specializing in selling services and support for this free software.

We may be facing a similar privatization of information. Although it's generally been held that facts are in the public domain even though the precise words expressing those facts may be copyrighted, a database treaty proposed to the W o r l d Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by the U.S. government at the end of 1996 was aimed at changing this. The proposed database treaty did not pass at W I P O 's December 1996 meeting. But the possible ramifications alarmed organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation ( E F F), which claimed it could potentially reduce access to information as diverse as stock quotes, sports results, and even government information via Freedom of Information Requests. [14]

"This treaty would completely undermine the 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service," the EFF noted. "In Feist, the Court rejected a claim of copyright for data from a telephone directory's white pages, finding that facts cannot be copyrighted and that obvious items, such as lists of names, addresses, and telephone numbers in alphabetical order, are not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection." It's worth noting that this situation doesn't prevail in all countries; in Britain, for example, the telephone directories are copyrighted by British Telecom (although an intrepid individual could compile his or her own directory from independent sources) and the database of postal codes is copyrighted by the Post Office. The result so far has been to keep this information off the public Net; it is possible, however, to access British Telecom's database via paid services.

The EFF was also concerned that the treaty as proposed would have included prohibitions against "the importation, manufacture or distribution of protection- defeating devices"--which, the EFF concluded, could mean anything from white-out to a pair of scissors (which could be used to remove copyright notices).[15] It's hard to imagine the law being enforced to such an extent, but that clause, together with provisions for holding system operators liable, has an ominous ring to many.

For all of the advantages of placing public data on the Net, it does have its downside. For example, it also allows much faster and more efficient invasion of privacy. In mid-1996, Oregon resident Aaron Nabil created a small media storm when he paid the $222 necessary to extract a magnetic tape copy of the state's database of license plates from the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV), wrote a script to search the database, and put the whole thing up on his World-Wide Web pages so any visitor could type in a license plate and get back the owner's full name and address. His motive, he said on the page at the time, was personal: he wanted to speed up tracking down motorists who whizzed dangerously down the street where his little sister liked to play. The data were, as Nabil pointed out, readily available to anyone who walked into a DMV office and paid $4 for an individual record. But many people didn't realize how public this information really was until it was placed on the Net. The risks that this kind of public access--as well as services like Switchboard and Four11, which provide the equivalent of nationwide telephone directories, some of them with easy access to local street maps--poses to individuals from potential stalkers or known abusers should be obvious. None these are data that couldn't be found easily offline, but the effort it would take to assemble the information might deter some.[16]