The Truth About Intellectual Property
MM: You talked about intellectual property. Obviously, there's been lots of talk about intellectual property, copy protection, digital rights management, just plain old rights management and all of that. Clearly we're getting to a pointtheoretically at leastwhere you can develop software to protect just about anything and where you can track just about anything that anybody does. Does it at all worry you about privacy? Tracking of things? Fair use and all that stuff going away?
BG: There are many issues in this area. And once upon a time, there was a lot of information that was public, but it was only semi-public because it was so hard to get to. You know, like court cases were public, but it wasn't like you could just type in your neighbors' name and see if they were ever in a divorce proceeding and see every little gory detail that ever took place. And reverse-indexing a phone book: It was actually hard to take a phone number and find out what name was associated with it in the phone book. Municipalities often will show peoples' water bills or electric bills because they're municipalities. The one I live in happens to show your water bill. So the newspaper runs, "Bill Gates' water bill is the following thing."
Technology has meant that instead of relying on just difficulty of assimilating information to implicitly protect privacy, the world is going to have to become explicit. And there are very tough challenges in this. I talked a lot about this in The Road Ahead.
If you're hiring a teacher, should you be able to see their criminal record? If you live next to a person, should you be able to see their criminal record? Well, say you want to distinguish those two: It means that you have to have some way of determining if somebody really is trying to hire somebody or not, or are they just pretending to? Because now you have a role-based definition for what the access rights are to historical information. If he's a bus driver for a school, maybe you should even be able to get his speeding tickets, while certainly the neighbor shouldn't be able to get the guy's speeding tickets. So society is being forced to think through all these tough issues.
Take trademark law: If a guy has something called Joe's Bar, just the fact that he got joesbar.com, what should the geographic scope of his right to that name be? Trademark law used to work okay, but there wasn't this one place trying to aggregate all of these trade names.
A lot of these technologies are very pro-privacy. Protecting medical records: You actually need this next generation of security technology. Say somebody plugs in between the keyboard and the computer something that records keystrokes. That can pull out passwords. So if you go into a doctor's office and somebody installs one of those things, they can pull out passwords. That's a bad thing. NGSCB [Next-Generation Secure Computing Base] blocks that. Just makes it so that won't happen. It turns out you need a better keyboard. It's a rich challenge-response protocol between the keyboard and the computer, because that is a channel we've got to protect from snooping.
Then there's the whole way that society decides where this technology should be applied. Should the doctor's office use this technology to keep your medical records secure? I'm pretty sure people will decide that's the case. Should the IRS use this technology to keep your tax records secure? I'm pretty sure they'll decide to do that. Will the CIA decide to use this technology when their old techniques don't work anymore, because they're having to collaborate with all these other police agencies and internationally so the idea of isolated networks doesn't work? They actually need encryption techniques that can allow you to go through insecure channels and still be secure, and prevent identity theft.
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Could this stuff be used inappropriately, where people are able to track things more than should be possible? Yes, that is possible. Those are political questions. And I discussed at length in The Road Ahead that in any society if you get a period of a lot of terrorist activity, you will draw the line differently than if you get a period with very little. Fine. That's why it's a political decision. Will the boundary between technologists and politicians lead to some nonoptimal things for periods of times? Potentially.
Will it be strange that some countries have one set of rules and other countries have another set of rules, and yet some of these technologies and communications we're trying to do on a global basis? Yes, there will be some strangeness. Just like dot-com names, the registry, people hate the fact the U.S. got this preeminent position. There is no country code for the U.S. [online]. There's nothing that responds if you type ".us" to anything out there. We are the global namespace. [Editor's note: there actually are now some addresses that end in .us, though the domain was added later than most of the commonly used top levels domains.] And you other guys, okay, type your country codes in. But we are the global namespace. I think all this stuff is fascinating. The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.
MM: What is Microsoft's role in leading some of those discussions?
BG: We've got a huge role, because we're this very successful company, because we're global, because we understand the technological possibilities. We're not the person who will make these decisions, but when people write a spam bill, we'd better have a techno person there talking about what can and can't be done. When people want to write privacy laws, it would be ideal if we could explain where some things actually get rid of reasonable capabilities versus just being purely protective. [In terms of] privacy it seems you want an infinite amount, but you don't really want, when you go meet the salesperson for the fifth time, for them to say, "I don't know what you want to buy," "I don't remember you," "Who are you?" You want e-mail dialog with certain merchants that you do business with. You could go overboard to ban things like that. So it's super-important we be part of the dialog. Some of these complicated issues got a little bit ignored during the late nineties when everybody was so hyped up. Now people are coming back to really thinking, "Boy, these are some top issues."
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