SYMPTOMS OF CHILDHOOD:
The charge plate and the off-limits Xerox machine:
WHEN WILL THE INTERNET GROW UP?

By Bill Densmore
Clickshare Founder

Since the Internet burst from its academic and defense origins in the mid-1990s, people who own "content" have been troubled by two things: How to get paid, and how to keep from being ripped off. Fresh efforts, technology and legal theories may make 2002 the year for answers.

Let me illustrate with two anecdotes from childhood.

When I was a boy, my mom used to let me paw through her handbag. I used to be fascinating by the array of "charge plates" she kept for a dozen or more stores. These aluminum strips, smaller than today's plastic credit card, carried her name and address and the unique number that was her revolving charge account - a different number for each store. Each month she got 12 bills, or at least bills from each store she had patronized.

Today, my mother has two "credit cards" which serve the same purpose.

Anyone who wonders whether the Internet needs a shared-authentication infrastructure for single sign-on and digital transactions need only refer to the example of my mother's aluminum-plated handbag.

Momentum is building for the kind of shared-authentication digital-content transaction service that Clickshare is now deploying in the newspaper industry and selected niche content providers. How many authentication and purchasing networks will ultimately exist? Who will control them? Will they allow anonymous purchasing or will your name be as necessary to a transaction as it is in the credit-card world?

The jockeying has begun. More on that a bit later.

NEWSPAPERS AHEAD OF THE CURVE?
The newspaper industry may yet get ahead of the curve on this one. Already, several of the large publishers are working with Clickshare, including Belo Corp., MediaNews Inc., and units of The McClatchy Co., The New York Times Co. and the E.W. Scripps Co. The uclick.com subsidiary of Andrews McMeel/Universal Press, the world's largest traditional syndicator, is now launching a service selling crosswords and comics on a syndicated basis through newspaper clients via Clickshare. And some of Clickshare's early pioneers are family-owned papers like the Lawrence [Ks.] Journal-World, Foster's Daily Democrat and the Concord Monitor, both in New Hampshire.

In October, Borrell & Associates, whose principals include a Harvard Business school expert on "disruptive technology" and four newspaper-industry veterans, published a study calling for the newspaper industry to consider a collaborative approach. Citing the failure of advertising to support most web publishing efforts, and the high cost of recruiting users, the report said strategic thinkers are considering a different approach. That approach is the distribution of users among many "home-base" websites, with a common system for allowing those users to be recognized at and to purchase from independent, even competing, websites.

Now with companies like Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard, American Express, United Airlines, Novell Inc. and BankAmerica focused on the notion of sharing users through something called the Liberty Alliance, why isn't the newspaper industry again organizing to play its card in a coordinated way?

An interesting cut on the idea of collaboration among news sites is on the website of the Newspaper Association of America. It's written by Gordon Borrell, an industry veteran-turned-consultant and it suggests the industry should be thinking about a universal "travel pass."

NEWSPAPER ALREADY MIX THE INGREDIENTS
The Liberty Alliance has the ingredients. It includes banks, retailers and telcos with millions of paying customers. It includes some entertainment companies have billions of dollars worth of "content" - music, video entertainment, games. And it includes technology companies, with the ability to develop the code and infrastructure.

But it doesn't have the right mix. Only one industry has both content and direct relationships with at least 60 million paying customers - the newspaper industry. We've written a brief summary of how Clickshare enables this sort of approach, going right back to Clickshare's conception in 1994.

So after six years of trying to figure out a business model for Internet publishing, publishers show signs of readiness to try a new approach -- collaborative competition. Or maybe its just a return to the good old-fashioned idea of syndication. In either case, watch for the formation of a news industry collaborative to get behind the "travel pass" concept.

"FEDERATED (SHARED) AUTHENTICATION" SWEEPSTAKES
The single-signon sweepstakes didn't really take center stage until about a Passport™ service. Bundled with the desktop operating system Windows XP, Passport would allow users to store personal information on Microsoft servers, then use it to "fill out" forms on commerce websites without having to type things over again.

Microsoft launched with its own websites but adoption by third parties seemed elusive. Potential collaborators complained they didn't want their customer's personal information controlled by Microsoft. Finally, Microsoft announced Sept. 20 that it would attempt to "open up" its Passport identification service, toward what it called "federated authentication" and possibly work with the public-domain Kerberos system from MIT.

A week later, Sun spearheaded an announcement of the Liberty Alliance, a group of 32 companies who were said to be ready to collaborate on a shared-authentication infrastructure. In the months since, the Liberty Alliance has added AOL/Time Warner Inc., MasterCard International and American Express Corp. as founders, and held a Jan. 22-24 summit meeting in Orlando, Fla. The latest "founder" to join the Liberty Alliance is networking software vendor Novell Inc.
(See also: Clickshare's view of why the Liberty Alliance could be important.

As of Jan. 3, there's also talk of Microsoft and IBM getting together on a shared-authentication protocol.

Still to be heard from - Visa.

THE HOLY GRAIL - "SINGLE SIGN-ON"?
At the heart of all of this effort is a desire to make it easy for consumers to transaction with multiple websites without having to pass around private information or create multiple accounts --- a so-called "single sign-on." While the Liberty Alliance is the highest-profile project in this arena, the seeds were sewn gradually. It started in 1994, when Clickshare's predecessor companies began worked on what we called our "one-ID, one-password" system for distributed user management. .

Although the idea was pioneered by Clickshare in 1994, others since have caught onto it. The newspaper industry has been considering shared user management for years, and even tried to pull it together in 1997 with the New Century Network.

On Aug. 28, 2000, Cisco announced it had formed a content alliance to accelerate the development of the content-delivery services market. Partners identified included Digital Island, Genuity Inc., GlobalCenter Inc., NaviSite Inc., PSINet Inc., and Network Appliance Corp. The New York Times story on the announcement said the group would "create a specification for peering needs, such as authorizing the use of content between networks, and sharing logging or billing information to settle charges." Now Cisco is part of the Liberty Alliance.

DO YOU MAKE IT HARD OR MAKE IT EASY?
The second anecdote from my childhood involves the Worcester, Mass., public library. I remember going there in the early 1960s and finding signs on the Xerox-brand photocopier saying that it was illegal to copy books and periodicals on it. I remember, as a kid, finding that rather absurd. What else was going to be copied in a library? Are we going through the same learning process online right now? Did the copy machine finish books as a viable business? On the contrary, the copy machine has probably contributed more to the sale and dissemination -- the marketing - of intellectual property than any other single invention.

When will we stop viewing perfect digital copies as a danger and instead view them as the greatest marketing opportunity to hit music, text and multimedia entertainment? The key is to make it easy for consumers to do the right thing -- buy information at a reasonable price -- rather than trying to make it hard to do the wrong thing -- steal it. And how do you make it easy?

In the entertainment, software and book businesses, much of the hand-wringing over the last several years hasn't been so much about how to get paid, but how to make sure you don't get ripped off. Companies like Sealed Media, Reciprocal, ContentGuard, RightsMarket, InterTrust, Preview Systems and Softlock Services have all tried to provide "locking" technologies which would somehow allow a consumer to get one-time or limited-time access to music, sofware or text objects, without being able to pass along the object. Now there's even talk that those efforts, at least with respect to "locked" CD-ROMs of music, may be illegal.

The evidence in the marketplace is that most of those efforts are floundering because they are hard for consumers to use. If you don't have the first sale, there isn't any reason to worry about theft. At the same time, the music-swapping services, which operate outside or at least at the very edge of copyright law, are flourishing even after the meltdown of Napster -- because they give people what they want - easy access to music.

So where is the middle ground between Napster's ease of use -- but no sale -- and the digital-rights management approach producing no sale because use is so difficult? Once again, the latest effort is really defined by Microsoft, which is now pushing encryption of content, so-called "digital-rights management", as an integrated part of its operating system, Microsoft Reader and Microsoft Media Player products.

The danger here is that all content may ultimately have to flow through a single point -- Microsoft -- a solution likely to be unacceptable to major content owners. And Microsoft's efforts are attracting the attention of hackers, who are already at work on breaking the encryption mechanism.

One thoughtful approach comes from Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. He argues in his new book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, (Random House) that it may be time to develop a theory of copyright law based upon "compensation without control" - a system of almost open access to copyrighted materials where the owner must permit use for reasonable compensation - prevails.

What's needed to make Lessig's idea work is agreement on a way to authenticate users as they access copyrighted material, and record their use. The marketplace can take care of the pricing function. That's Clickshare. We limit our gatekeeping role to nothing more than authentication and logging (recording clicks). Vendors own their content; retailers own their customers. All we create is the marketplace for exchange to happen.

In the next few months, major companies will be making decisions about how to eliminate the metal charge plates - multiple accounts and registration -- and how make it easy to buy instead of hard to steal. Many may work through the Liberty Alliance. Others may try a different approach.