What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone? It’s Been a Decade Since the Break-up of AT&T. Has the Spirit Passed Out of its Bell Labs, as Some Charge? Or is it Still the Preeminent Technology Lab in the U.S.? | Imagining the Internet

The prediction, in brief:

An electronic “watermark,” consisting of small shifts in the spacing of text … will allow publishers to identify and trace individual copies of works that have been printed from computer files. If successful, the watermark will be a viable mechanism allowing payment to be extracted for printing specific pieces of text off a computer network.

Predictor: Kristol, Dave

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Richard Rapaport goes to visit AT&T’s Bell Labs research scientists and administrators, interviewing Dave Kristol about the Bell Labs SEPTEMBER Project. Rapaport writes:”Dave Kristol is demonstrating new Bell Labs technology that creates an electronic ‘watermark,’ consisting of small shifts in the spacing of text that will allow publishers to identify and trace individual copies of works that have been printed from computer files. If successful, the watermark will be a viable mechanism allowing payment to be extracted for printing specific pieces of text off a computer network; it will prevent illegal copying and allow for the collection of royalties. ‘If you hand out copies to 1,000 of your best friends, we can ask you to pay,’ says the Young Turk in the distributed systems research department. Then Kristol laughs and describes another feature his group is working on. ‘We call it an anonymous credit card,’ he says about a system in which ‘a person online can pay, but the seller doesn’t know to whom his material is going.’ As he speaks, Kristol continues working his way through a demonstration of Bell Labs’s SEPTEMBER Project. The nightmare of every online freedom fighter, Bell Labs’s ‘Secure Electronic Publishing Trial’ project offers the possibility of bringing the electronic network into the realm of laissez faire economics and making ‘pay per piece’ electronic publishing possible.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues

Subtopic: Copyright/Intellectual Property/Plagiarismty

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone? It’s Been a Decade Since the Break-up of AT&T. Has the Spirit Passed Out of its Bell Labs, as Some Charge? Or is it Still the Preeminent Technology Lab in the U.S.?

Quote Type: Paraphrase

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/bell.labs_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney