DEMYSTIFYING THE INTERNET ------------------------- _American_Lawyer_, October 1994 David G. Post You have probably heard your fill of grandiose predictions about the Coming of the Internet ("the 'Net" to aficionados, the "National Information Infrastructure" to the bureaucrats): absolutely nothing -- not the way you work, the way you play, the way you educate your children, the way you interact with your friends, the very Meaning of Life -- will ever be the same now that it has arrived in full glory. Well, whatever may be the consequences for the Meaning of Life, it is difficult to believe that emergence of the Internet is not going to have a real, and possibly even a profound, effect on the work that we lawyers do and the context in which we do it is -- on the practice of law, the business of law, and perhaps even the nature of Law. What is the Internet? First and foremost, it is nothing more than a computer network, conceptually similar to the Local Area Network (LAN) that you may have at your office. Like any network, it is simply a system linking individual free-standing computers by means of (a) physical connections (in the case of your LAN, cables running inside your office walls) and (b) a language that each of the computers is programmed to understand, the electronic "rules of the road" that allow each computer on the network to transmit information to any other computer and to act on the messages it receives -- to forward some messages to a third machine, to transfer a particular file to the computer from which the message originated, etc. -- in the manner specified. The Internet differs from your LAN, however, in three important ways. First, no special cables are required; ordinary telephone lines can be used for the physical links among Internet computers. Second, the Internet's common language -- the "Internet Protocol" -- is non-proprietary and publicly available (unlike the proprietary software that controls operations on your LAN). And third, the Internet language is built upon the principle of decentralization; unlike your LAN, where a central computer -- the network "server" -- stores all of the files and routes all electronic mail messages, files can be stored anywhere on the Internet and messages can travel from machine to machine without ever passing through a central point. Because ordinary telephone lines can be used for the physical links among Internet computers (see Box), any computer with access to a dedicated telephone line can join the Internet -- and at latest count, 3.2 million computers have done so (1 million in the last 6 months). Immense as this is, it vastly understates the Internet's reach; because telephone lines are the medium of Internet communication, anyone with a computer and a modem can dial in to one of these "backbone" computers, and, while the telephone connection is active, be "on" the Internet. Estimates of the number of dial-in Internet participants runs as high as 20 million (with 20% monthly growth). * * * * * * * * * * * SIDEBAR: THE INTERNET'S CENTRAL FEATURES The Internet's phenomenal growth may be due in large measure to certain of its rather unusual features. First, unlike your office network (which requires the installation of special cables), ordinary telephone lines can be used for the links among Internet computers. Second, the Internet's common language -- the "Internet Protocol" that allows each computer on the network to transmit information to any other computer and to act on the messages it receives -- is non-proprietary and publicly available (again, in contrast to the proprietary software that controls operations on your LAN). * * * * * * * * * * * That is, basically, what it is. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no "there" there; no one owns the Internet, no one operates it, no one can point to it or say exactly where it is, how big it is, or how much traffic it bears. It is less illuminating to think of it as a tangible "thing" than as a system connecting previously free-standing "things," transforming, if you will, millions of small digital ponds into a single digital ocean. With the Internet in place, virtually any information stored in digital form -- and think, just for starters, of every musical composition now recorded on CD, virtually every opinion ever issued by virtually any court in this country, the output of virtually every newspaper and magazine in the developed world, and indeed most of what each of the readers of this magazine put down in writing each day -- can be transferred, almost instantaneously and for little more than the price of a local phone call, to any, or all, of those 20 million or so computers now connected to the global network. What difference will all this make to the practice of law? Predicting the impact of new technologies is a tricky business -- many people were convinced that the telephone would be used for listening to opera, after all. I will not try to persuade you here that this is the most fundamental transformation in the way that information is organized and communicated since Gutenberg invented the printing press, and that no one in the business of organizing and communicating information will remain untouched by its emergence (though I believe both statements to be true). I will instead look at just one small corner of this vast canvas, and suggest that the Internet, by giving your clients new capabilities to search for information, will transform lawyers' (and law firms') relationship to their own work product. Let's see why this might be so. To begin with, consider that even with the rather primitive search tools now available over the Internet, you can perform a kind of search that was not possible a few years ago (and that was virtually unimaginable a few decades ago): you can now find information -- texts, documents, memoranda, papers, etc. -- pertinent to a particular question without knowing beforehand where to look, since your search can be performed everywhere on the network at once. That is, you can post a query on the Internet -- looking, say, for documents explaining the elements of copyright infringement -- and the search will comb through databases and other collections of whose whereabouts, and very existence, you are completely unaware -- statutory summaries and annotations compiled by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, the speeches of Learned Hand posted on the Net by some enterprising law student, the legal memoranda, perhaps, prepared by the law firm right down the street from you. In a real sense, information, once placed on the Internet, can find the question(s) to which it is relevant, rather than the questioner having to find the relevant information. These searches are, to be sure, cumbersome and unreliable; searching the Internet feels, in fact, more like using a 10-year old version of Lexis or Westlaw on a computer whose battery keeps running low than your ticket to the 21st century. But because the Internet has only recently emerged as a mass-market phenomenon, comparatively few resources have yet been devoted to making it easily usable by ordinary mortals; the race to make more sophisticated search tools available is now under a full head of steam, for whomever finds the way -- or just any way -- to make these searches easier is going to make a great deal of money. The same "natural language" search capabilities that have now made their way onto Lexis and Westlaw will, for example, surely soon be available for Internet-wide searches, allowing anyone to point a question in English towards the digital ocean -- "I own a bookstore; what should I do if I am informed by a publisher's representative that the author of a book published by a competitor contains material that constitutes copyright infringement?" -- from which it will return, like an obedient terrier, relevant documents dangling from its mouth. Those of you still using the West bound digests for your primary legal research may doubt that people will actually find useful information this way. The rest of you are presumably less reluctant to embrace the notion that online searching can become more efficient than alternative means, having watched this happen close to home over the past several years. What will people be looking for, and what kinds of information will be made available, on the Internet? First as a trickle, then in a torrent, lawyers' work product will inevitably be recycled onto the Internet -- some of it perhaps for sale, some of it for free, but it will be there. There is, after all, substantial demand for this information on the part of clients and potential clients (which covers just about everybody). Because legal problems, while enormously diverse, do tend to recur with some frequency, lawyers are not infrequently in the position of "reinventing the wheel" -- charging clients for the research and other information-processing activities that others have previously engaged in. Consumers of legal services are understandably unhappy with this state of affairs, but the market currently provides them with few options; it is costly, and at times impossible, to obtain information about lawyers (other than those with whom they ordinarily deal) who may have faced and already solved problems similar to those now being addressed, and thus it is usually less expensive to re-invent the wheel than to determine whether there are alternative (and less expensive) sources of supply for the advice or other services they seek. Courtesy of the Internet, the cost of obtaining that information is in free fall. But lawyers will not make that information available, you say? Lawyers will not take a product for which there is substantial market demand, a product that costs virtually nothing to produce -- memos and briefs that are already written -- and place it where it can actually be found by the very people who indicate that they need it? Perhaps not. But while you're summarizing your recent work in trademark infringement litigation and recycling it into an "all client memo" -- most copies of which, being irrelevant to any immediate problem facing any of your current clients, end up in the trash -- your not-so- friendly competition is going to put its memo where somebody who actually needs help with a trademark infringement matter can find it. And don't say I didn't warn you when a long-standing client of yours comes in to ask you to handle defense of her trademark infringement action -- and tells you to use the brief written by one of your competitors, which she plucked off the Net and now plunks down on your desk, as the starting point for your own work. Predictions, as I said, are tricky, and I am sure that many of you think there is much more, or much less, going on here than I have suggested. In the spirit of the new technological age, I welcome your comments or thoughts on the above, or on any of the topics I treat in future columns (or those I should be paying more attention to), which can be sent to me by email at Lexis Counsel Connect (or at Dpostn00@eff.org on the Internet).