1. Development in digital technology presents seemingly contradictory potentials. On the one hand, they offer unprecedented new opportunities to protect the security of private information and copyrighted works. Both personal communications and copyrighted works, for example, can be protected technologically by encryption software and other techniques. Some of these techniques are so clever and complex that they simply cannot be “broken”.

2. On the other hand, digital technologies have opened up unprecedented new threats to protection of private information and copyrighted materials. Once information about individuals is available in publicly accessible electronic databases, it can be accessed by virtually anyone anywhere. By putting together information from multiple databases, it is possible to assemble detailed composites about individuals that would generally have been too cumbersome or expensive to compile from diffuse print sources.

3. Similarly, once copyrighted materials are in electronic form, it is extremely easy and inexpensive to “upload” them to a computer connected to global networks, from which the material can then be readily transmitted to or downloaded by people from all over the world. If the copyright owner is the one who has placed the work on this computer and sought to make it available to the world, this can be very beneficial. However, if done by an un-authorized person, it can have devastating financial consequences for the rightsholder.

4. One of the principal challenges that national and international communities face today is how to formulate forward-looking, balanced policies that will simultaneously take advantage of the opportunities that new technologies present for protecting privacy and intellectual property interests and avoid the pitfalls of underprotection and overprotection of privacy and intellectual properties that these technologies enable.

5. On the privacy side, governments will be tempted to regulate cryptography and other technologies to stop people from communicating with one another in a manner that these governments cannot understand. Key escrow systems have been proposed as a balanced solution to the problem that governments perceive if encryption is too strong. Yet, these proposals remain controversial because many in the “wired” community value personal privacy so much that they wish to be free of all government controls on how they attain this privacy.

6. On the intellectual property side, concerns are arising that technological protections, supplemented by new legal norms, may protect intellectual properties so much that educational, scientific and other cultural progress on which the information society ultimately depends will be undermined. Some schemes for technological protection may also present serious privacy questions (as might occur if a digital document kept track of what a user was reading and reported this information back to the rightsholder).

7. UNESCO can and should play an important role in promoting the interests of education, science and culture in international discussions about privacy and intellectual property policies for the global information society.