ABSTRACT

In digital documents, the reader is given the power to reformat and reorganize the text and thereby the context within which the information appears; thus authority is replaced by provenance. The first digital libraries included the kinds of shared information that were given social context by a shared professional culture. They contained e-mail messages, reference works, tools to manage data, and the forms of literature that build serial relationships through the shared hostility of games, jokes, and pornography. In the digital age, if intellectual property is the primary content of world trade, intellectual property markets will be regulated by international trade agreements and treaties, not the normal political processes and values that now shape national policy. The uses of cyberspace have included the logistic control of real-time numeric data for military, scientific, and technical research largely funded by the government and now, perhaps, to regulate the marketplace of intellectual property in cyberspace.