Protection of Intellectual Property Interests

cially, by giving new dignity and new status to the sacred act of teaching. Technology can instantaneously transmit information all around the world. But technology, with all of its dazzling effects, cannot convey wisdom. For this we need educational institutions that help students of all ages become more discerning, teaching the capacity to separate the shoddy from that which is elegant and enduring. Protection of Intellectual Property Interests Joelde Rosnay Ladies and Gentlemen: I have a little surprise for you! This is not joel de Rosnay talking to you right now! It is his virtual clone, downloaded from Paris at 156 megabits on a fiber optics ATM line, and projected by a 3D holographic camera on stage! This just might be the way somebody would start a conference 20 years from now. It is all technically possible. Also, there would be no more intellectual property rights, but rather "biological" property rights. I'm telling you all this because technology, as you know, is progressing at such a fast pace that we really have to keep up with it and try to anticipate some of its outcomes. This is exactly what we do at the Cite des Sciences all the time. In this vast Science Museum we constantly come up against these kinds of problems. We welcome six million visitors a year. We have local rights for images and software and we are hoping to move to the Web on the Internet. So we have to negotiate every right with each creator-a very tedious and complex undertaking. As an author, and director, I am personally confronted with this problem. For instance, I was the creator of a program called "The Bionautes," a voyage made inside the human body, which was shown at the Cite for a year. We then wanted to put it on a CD-ROM, and then on the Internet. So we had to get recognition of all the rights once again. This is the kind of problem we come up against very often. At the Cite des Sciences, we also monitor new technologies. Imagine that five or ten years from now people will have a very powerful portable computer with direct access to the networks , not only through a phone socket in the wall, but through radio waves at very high speeds. This information could be copied on very tiny CDs, Joel de Rosnay, Cite des Sciences et de 1'lndustrie, 30 avenue Corentin Carton. 75930 Paris, France. 250 Intellectual Property Rights and the Arts which could be reinscriptable, and we could re-use that information at will. In this way everybody could be transformed into a potential thief as he would have been in the old ways of protecting information. Of course, I would prefer to consider these people as potential co-creators, rather than potential thieves! I would now like to propose to you a model on which to consider and reflect . A model which might help us to protect the rights of these future co-creators . The model is biology. This may seem strange to some of you, the relationship between biology and the digital world. Yet I believe that they share a lot of things in common which can lead us to some solutions to problems confronting us today. Let me give you three examples . The first example-a universal language . Biology has a universal language which is called DNA, strings of information , or proteins attached sequentially in a given order. The digital world also uses strings of electronic data encoded to manipulate strings of characters. You type out a key word on a data base, and it pulls out many references. In this there is continuity between the biological and the digital world: a universal language. The second similarity is the reproduction mechanism. As we all know, all biological systems are basically reproduction machines. Templates, catalysts and polymerases are made to copy molecules . The modern digital world is a macro-reproduction machine. Faxes, disks and diskettes, camcorders and copiers are made to copy. Information wants to be copied, and we restrict it for good reasons. Finally, another similarity is evolution . Biology changes over a long process of mutation, selection, crossover and recombination...