Deciding Where Technology Ends 
and 
the Law Begins

Robert Thibadeau, Ph.D.
August, 1994
CMU-RI-TR-95-07

The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Copyright (c) 1995 Robert Thibadeau

ABSTRACT

This is a non-technical paper intended to provoke thought.  It examines an internationally proposed digital television standard as the basis for laws that protect ownership in the information age.  

Deciding Where Technology Ends 
and 
the Law Begins

Robert Thibadeau, Ph.D.
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

A few years ago, I began a venture called Television Computer, Inc., with Dick Leghorn of Massachusetts, the father of Cable Laboratories.  In his many teachings, we considered the problem of personal rights, obligations, and property security on what has now become known as the information superhighway.  We are both technologists, but we recognized no amount of technology can provide ultimate security, in property, rights, or obligations, since there is always the case of the "privileged insider" who can abuse the system.  Furthermore, as recent CIA spying cases have shown, such "privileged insiders" are not figments of the technologist's imagination.  Then Dick said something to me, "The interesting problem is drawing the line where technology ends and the law begins."  This is, indeed, an interesting problem.  Technologists should write about this problem. We are not the legal scholars, but we understand technology potential.  Something a lawyer may think is hard and confusing, we may know to be reasonable and straightforward.  This article describes a partnership between law and technology that invigorates and incentivizes free commerce, minimizes government, and pays its own way.

The information superhighway of today is the Internet.  But this highway is just barely civilized and is surely the wild west of the end of the twentieth century.  Congress would also spread this wild west into telephone and television.  This is a land that the Progress and Freedom Foundation has called "cyberspace."  Being from the old school of computer science, I think of it as a land of symbols, like the symbols that are words on this page,  the dollar bills in your pocket, or the stamps on an envelope.   It is an intrinsic part of present day reality.  It impinges with ever increasing substance on all aspects of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

Even though a world of symbols may seem alien, mankind, through dealings in money, government, and religion, has been finding ways to draw the legal line in the land of symbols for thousands of years.   One should first assume there is nothing new here, in cyberspace, except the variety of symbols and the speed with which they are manipulated.  

Where, in law, should we look for guidance?  Take a look at the 'wild west' of capitalism.  At a recent Progress and Freedom Foundation conference, it was observed that foreigners commonly suspect that capitalism is controlled by a master conspiracy.  No, the speaker countered; it is driven in a chaos of opportunity, by incentive, but not by a ruling conspiracy.  I would argue this opinion is mistaken.  Capitalism flourishes when there is a heavy hand of the law: the old fashioned, steadfast, protection of property.  Capitalism is indeed constructed by a conspiracy: a conspiracy among those few people who write and judge property laws.  In the world of cyberspace, we should carefully construct our notions of "property," and we should carefully construct our notions of "the form of the property protection laws."  I submit that this is stuff for the most human, common sense and ages old, kind of consideration.  It is not the stuff for confusion.

The rule that creates order is property law.  Theft, the violation of individual ownership, is a very basic and old legal notion.   But don't confuse theft in the world of symbols with a violation of copyright law!  Copyright law, and other, more esoteric forms of law, including all "intellectual property," and "regulation," evolve from basic property law. The wild west of cyberspace lacks consensus on basic property, so it is no wonder that people, including this author, are confused about "intellectual property," and people find "regulation" inappropriate.  Sit back through the last millennium, and recognize how complicated but simple, and pervasive but specific, this thing of property is.  I suppose the land of cyberspace is lawless precisely because most people are prematurely worried about "copyright," "regulation," or "technical means for insuring ownership."  Such things assume a consensus exists about what can be owned in cyberspace, and how it can be owned.  But where is this consensus?  

Discussion that provides a recipe for consensus should precede a lot of what is popularly discussed today.  In the lawless Internet today, about the only activity one can prudently justify is giving stuff away free.  This is an ancient act of a peasantry in a lawless land -- the abrogation of rights in order to survive.  With property laws for protection, value is created by the limitation to access.  In the creation of value, the cost of property law pays for itself.

Without a clear notion of property, and the law designed to protect it, we can only rely on technical means.  You will have to pay the technology lords, the IBM, EDS, Microsoft, RSA, or Netscape, Inc., to protect your rights.  But we know, a priori, that technical means for protection, unaccompanied by law, are at best "renegade," and "fiefdom" laws, and, at worst, invitations for hackers and theft.   The mafias of cyberspace are, at this moment, being created by well-intentioned people as well as ill-intentioned ones.  No IBM, EDS, Microsoft, RSA, or Netscape wants consciously to be a mafia or a petty lord, but absolute power corrupts.  Human rights need the protection of law.  

On this note, let us turn to the oldest symbolic property, money, and then to the next oldest, stamps.  Money and stamps are not "copyrighted," they are owned!

Money has been a common human artifact for thousands of years.  The word is "stuff" like "water," but it is really composed of a large collection of symbols.  A coin or bill is a symbol for wealth.  Even when a coin is gold or a bill is backed by gold, the amount of gold is still a symbol for wealth.  It is abstract, like any good symbol, because it can substitute for many different things in physical reality. Money could exist in cyberspace.  Cyberspace is a region of countless symbols, in countless variety, all moving about, interacting with one another, and cheaply accessed with a personal computer and modem.  But, again we are premature. Before we discuss money in cyberspace, we need to discuss property: the symbols of cyberspace as things that money buys.  Consider money as a prototype for how law is historically written for things as non-substantive as symbols.

The government guarantees, with law, two attributes of money, your right to possess it and a universal quantitative measure of it.  One dollar can be yours.   The government, through theft laws, secures this right.  Furthermore, law authorizes the denominations of money: one dollar is one dollar, while five is the sum of five ones.  However, this authorization does not define value: the law allows you to exchange a five for six ones.

As a service, the government protects the value of the money.  Nowadays, the government skips the gold standard (an older symbology), and controls, by law, the printing and minting of money.  There is only one authorized source of money.  The law that protects production is counterfeiting law.  It is a felony to print your own money.  A popular misconception is that they make it hard to counterfeit bills, but, as a member of the Technical Association for Graphics Arts, I will tell you that most people in the printing industry know it is not that hard.  It is simply illegal.  

There are laws of theft and counterfeiting, but no governmental laws that say you have to trade a five for five ones.  We presume, here, laws made by men and natural laws that men do not have to state.  But notice, we have natural law, here, applied by men to a symbol made entirely by men.  Hurray!  People, for centuries, have already figured out a system of laws coupled to a system of common sense that governs the abstract interactions of abstract symbols!

Now, consider another place where the law is curiously absent, or largely absent.  The government does not, by law, guarantee a right to trade the property of a dollar with the property of a good or service.  The trade laws that do exist are fairness laws that say, mainly, that if you already trade goods for money, you cannot unreasonably withhold further trade.  The government does not enforce specific trade value by law.  While there are arguable exceptions, in the case of governmental interactions with other sovereign states, or banks working with the central bank, the value of money, inside the country's economy, is largely left free.  People recognize that freedom to set trade value is good, and that price regulation is not good.  In fact, price regulation tends to correlate with distortions of property ownership.  Witness communism.

The system of money is supported by more than a majority rule.  There is  overwhelming consensus that exists among the people.  If, for example, 1%  of the people disagreed with the prohibition on printing money, over a million people in America would be counterfeiting.  This many people conspiring to counterfeit would surely send the system into a tailspin.  People don't do it because there is an overwhelming consensus with the law. 

Property law on symbols tend to be effective and easy to maintain when there is law reinforced by consensus.  The question of where to draw the line is a human question, and humans must find comfort in the answers.  If the answers give the appearance of unduly constraining freedom or, alternatively, violating an ethical reserve, the lines drawn will not be obeyed.   The laws governing money are wonderful examples of good laws that invigorate commerce without creating a huge bureaucracy.  The bureaucracy can be small because the consensus is great, and because the tasks of enforcement and judgement are simple to understand.  

Symbols in cyberspace can be similarly protected by law.  Here is the recipe that expands the way to think about where to draw a line when technology ends and the law begins:  Protect the ownership rights and obligations of the symbol that stands for the content, and let the symbol that stands for the content declare the property rights expected for the content.   The symbol that needs legal protection afforded a dollar bill has the form of a label or stamp.  

Most of the above discussion of money applies as well to postage stamps.  Furthermore, the "cancel" stamp the post office stamps on top of the postage stamp is a dependent label protected from misuse by law.   It is illegal to open a letter that is stamped, cancelled, and not labeled for your receipt.  I would argue that digital stamps are the right place to start in thinking about laws in cyberspace.  

A label or stamp in cyberspace cannot look "pretty or distinctive," since the physical symbol itself is a transient collection of electrons or photons.   However, as with money, we should be able to guarantee that the symbol is unique.  That guarantee of uniqueness can be global.  If I can "print" a cyberspace stamp that only I have the authority to print, and I can print it knowing that that stamp is globally unique, then I can print something that, as a matter of the necessities of legal theory, looks a lot like money or postal stamps.  

Such a globally unique labelling scheme has just recently been proposed for use in cyberspace by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) "Header/Descriptor working group," of which I am a member.  This group was formed under the authority of the International Telecommunications Union of the United Nations (the ITU) and the U.S. Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC).  The ATSC is the successor to the NTSC (N for "National"), and it was the NTSC that, around 1950, brought you the television that is in your home today.  For clarity, let us signify this globally unique label as a Label (capital "L").  A Label can be thought of as a stamp if, someday, it gets legally protected like a stamp.  Otherwise, it is just a Label.

The SMPTE working group is concerned with property in cyberspace, because our members know that motion pictures and television programs are being brought to cyberspace.   But, nearly everybody else we can imagine should be similarly concerned.  Bankers, manufacturers, teachers, lawyers, one and all, should be concerned with Labels.  Cyberspace, like the wild west, is a place where anybody should be able to seek their fortune.

In order to better understand the Label, recognize that, like letters in the mail, words on a page, or dollars in your pocket, symbols in cyberspace come in bundles. People deal in bundles of symbols.  Just call any such bundle, "a message."  The Label standard has to do with Labels we might care to put on  messages.  

Labels can provide the "postage" stamp on a message, the "cancel" stamp on the postage,  the address on the message, and the "return" address.  But Labels are not restricted to just these types. Think about a message with possibly many different stamps.  Perhaps, the stamps that we should be inventing are not exactly like 'postage,' 'cancellation,' 'sender,' and 'receiver.'  Perhaps some are.  Perhaps some Labels should be protected by law that protects rights and enforces obligations, and some should not.   

Our SMPTE Label proposal talks about the form of Labels -- how they must be constructed to guarantee their global uniqueness, and how an unencumbered authority may yet produce new Labels without asking any organization for permission.  

Labels achieve this seeming impossibility by appending successive authorities that have authorized successive names.  People are familiar with the principle of naming their children.  This is the same principle but it guarantees globally unique names.  Like the name "John Smith," a Label has its family name and name within the family, but unlike "John Smith", the Label explicitly states all its ancestors back to the global root, and it is, mainly because of this, guaranteed to be globally unique.  

Among Labels, there would be no other "John Smith" in the world, but the Smith's would not have to consult any other authority or gain any permission in order to name a son "John."  For the Label proposal, the authorities are arranged in strict descendency from the single global root point, an entity established by the United Nations, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU.  Here is a partial listing of the progenitors and origins of all global Labels:

ITU (International Telecommunications Union of the United Nations)
   |- CCITT [0] (Telephone Consultative Committee)
  	 |- recommendation [0] (CCITT Standards)
	 |- question [1]
	 |- administration [2]
	 | - network-operator [3]
  |- ISO/IEC [1] (International Standards Organization, 
	                           International Electrotechnical Committee)
     |- standard[0] (ISO standards) 
     |-registration authority [1] (ISO authorities)
     |-member body [2] (identified by telephone country code)
       |-Russia [7]  (Russia can generate unique Labels without asking permission)
       |-United States [31] (same for the U.S.)
       |-China [8] (same for China)
     |-organization  [3] 
       |-SMPTE [52] (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers)
       |-ANSI (American National Standards Institute)

By the way these Labels work, an authority can create new Labels by appending more Label information to the Label he now has.  Thus, SMPTE has the unique name "ITU organization SMPTE."  The actual Label uses code numbers: ITU[1] organization[1] SMPTE[52] or 1.1.52.  SMPTE may create, in a fully sovereign fashion, a Label for something it wishes to name.  Since this is an engineering group, let us suppose it wants a Label for one of its digital communications standards, "260M". the Label is then "1.1.52.260M".  The important points are that  this Label is guaranteed to be globally unique and the sovereign authority over this Label is SMPTE.  If I ever encounter the Label 1.1.52.260M, I can contact SMPTE and ask whether the person using this Label had the right to use it.  This is no different from my encountering a dollar bill and asking the Secret Service if it is a counterfeit.  However, it might be that SMPTE explains that anybody can use this Label as long as the message conforms to the SMPTE standard message form for "260M."  The misuse of other kinds of Labels could be a felony: for example, an illegally obtained or illegally used  ITU[1].memberbody[2].United States[31].cyberpostage_stamp_$1.00[24] Label.

A country has a unique name, "ITU[1].memberbody[2].United States[31]."  The United States is granted the authority to "mint" its Labels, and its immediate descendents, but not Russia's or any other Labels.  People and organizations should be able to mint their own Labels.   Good judgement says there should perhaps be a universal human right to a sovereign Label.   Perhaps this right should be protected in a bill of rights.

The beauty of this system is that it is decentralized while guaranteeing that any Label is globally unique or as unique as a traceable authority has chosen to make it.  The ITU, or entities under it, can establish registration authorities that generate Labels that may be owned by others.  For example, the ITU could establish a[n] message-ownership registration authority, call it ITU-ownership, and allow any person or entity the right to have a Label in it that is composed of ITU-ownership and the person's Label in his country.  The ITU or United States, on its own, could establish a $1.00 copyright protection Label that provides the owner with a misdemeanor legal protection on his copyright and a $1000 copyright protection Label that protects the owner with a felonious legal protection.  Illegally using such a Label could be felonious counterfeiting.  Money could be generated with Labels although these would certainly need added technical security.  Such security is afforded through a Label type we have called "composite."

Now, suppose we pass a law that says that Label ownership of your personal (or corporate) Label is ordinary property ownership.  You can sell the message that your ownership stamp is on.  Furthermore you can sell your ownership in that stamp.   Furthermore, you cannot claim to own something you do not, in fact, own, and you cannot use anybody's ownership stamp without their authority to do so.  Now, suppose I encounter a message that says it is mine, but I know it is not mine.  I report the false attribution as counterfeiting.   Furthermore, I may encounter  somebody else's stamp on a message I believe that I own.   I can now attempt to show the theft.   

Another interesting problem is the problem of designing stamps that can provide a trace of counterfeiting or theft with the aid of technical means.  So, for example, certain telecommunications networks may have tracing capability, and a stamp may designate that a message is not to leave that network.   If it ever does, the possessor of the message is in illegal possession.

One must be careful with stamps.  For example, a Label may state that the contents of a packet are in an encoded form.   A Law could require that the use of that Label be correct.  On the other hand, we may say that a contents encoding Label will have no adverse consequences, and no enforcement is needed.   "Natural" law will take care of keeping such Labels right. 

We might put a country of origin stamp on a message.  It would be possible to pass a national law that says that messages encountered at our superhighway borders must have a country of origin Label.  If they do not, they will be turned away at the border and not allowed to enter.  At the border, a packet may require a tax stamp...ah, Label.  Furthermore, it is illegal to fake these Labels.  The tax Label authority retains the right to disburse the Labels.  Again, technical means are available that can help the authority do this, but the legal remedy is the final remedy for abuse. 

A copyright is another kind of stamp that (as is well recognized) is different from ownership.  Indeed a copyright may be seen as a collection of permissions administered by different authorities.  I find the whole concept of a right to copy ill-advised in cyberspace.  The machines that keep cyberspace running smoothly are constantly copying.  It would be impossible, even it were well-advised, to keep track of all the 'illegal' copying that goes on. 

Rather, suppose it were illegal for certain Labels to be removed from a message once placed on it, and that these Labels had owners who designated who is permitted to read the message.  This is like the law that says that it is illegal to read a letter or otherwise tamper with the U.S. Mail.  We completely bypass "copyright" as a right to copy and change this to a right to read, a "readright."   So, if a message owner requires payment when his message is to be read, anyone reading the message must show he has obtained a stamp from the owner that provides the permission.  Again, while technical means, such as encryption, may be used to verify a stamp's authenticity, it is the authority that can ultimately state whether the permission has been given or the rules under which the permission is to be given.

I believe that this implies a place for copyright authorities that are somewhat unlike the existing ones.  A copyright authority under a Label could specify the rules under which copyrights listed under its authority aconversion.  This mapping helps us to view pattern reocognition in a different light -- showing areas where, perhaps, new research is "naturally" invited and can be understood for its importance in practical application.  2. Definition of Feature3  User Interaction Model4  Overview of the Eleven Feature Classes5 Underlying Implementation6 Results and Conclusionsdefine a tool that any personal computer user would find fun to use by non-technical people while significantly expanding the scope of appöööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööö