Summary: Five Solutions to Intellectual Property Issues in a Digital Age

and the anxiety we are encountering as individuals and as a society as we enter the digital age. It's as if all of us have set out on a virtual journey to a new country-call it Digital Land-where we must all learn new customs and a new language. The young among us will adapt most quickly, of course, and puzzle why the transformation has been as difficult for us elders. We will need to be trained and educated, perhaps taking digital-as-a-second-language courses at our local community college. But if we all really apply ourselves, with luck we can be the last generation to speak digital with an accent. Summary: Five Solutions to Intellectual Property Issues in a Digital Age AlanJ Friedman In our panel discussions, presentations, and chats over lunch, we have heard intellectual property rights in a digital age discussed from three points ofview. There are the creators, self-described on occasion as the "road kill on the information superhighway." There are the presenters, the distributors of content through publications, museums, narrowcast and broadcast media, who told us the great risks they have to take and the high cost of getting the arts to a public market. And then we heard, especially at lunch from Ernest Boyer, a passionate plea to consider the third party, the ultimate consumers, including teachers and the students, and their needs for access and equity, for the selection and integration of knowledge, and for credible sources of art and culture. All agree that the well-established relationships among those three essential groups of players are being changed by the new technologies. The old rules of the game are not working in the presence of flawless digital reproduction and massive global data transfer by individuals . My own observation, which is not original, is it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. The relationships among creators, presenters, and consumers of art and culture are never going to go back to the way they were. Our task now is to come up with new relationships within which we can all work. Each of the three groups has very real needs. The artist has to eat in order to continue the process of creation. The presenter has to get products to Alanj. Friedman, New York Hall of Science, 47-Oll11th Street, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York, NY 11368, U,S.A. market and make money on them. The consumer has to have affordable, convenient access to authentic, reliable information and cultural expression. What new relationships can provide for the dissemination of the arts and meet the needs of all three parties to the cultural connection? During our discussions I heard five proposals, and I'll try to summarize each of them briefly. The first was what might be called the royal patronage solution. And in fact, that is a major way the arts were supported some centuries ago. The king selected and fed the court artist, who produced works of art, which were then owned by the crown. The crown, at its pleasure, could provide access to the works for large or small audiences. There are various benevolent versions of the royal patronage scheme around today. The National Endowment for the Arts is something like a royal patron, as is the private foundation which makes a grant to an artist to create and present a work. So is the magazine publisher, described by Frank Bennack, who pays a flat fee up front for total ownership of an essay. The second scheme is what I'll call the loss leader. This method is informed by the belief that the new mass media are never as good as the real thing-the actual real painting, the real play on the stage, the real opera. But by offering glimpses of art as a "loss leader," by putting it out there even for free, we can create an audience willing to pay money to see the real thing. These stimulated consumers will visit and pay for real museums and theaters in their home towns. The loss leader version assumes that the free, digital versions of art will be recognized by...