Information technology policy is too important to leave entirely to lawyers. This theme has been at the core of my work in the past decade. It is the reason I have entreated computing professionals, including readers of Communications, to become involved in the policy issues affecting their field. More recently, I have come to realize that information technology policy is also too important to leave entirely to technologists. This thought crystallized for me in June of 1997 when I attended the ACM Digital Library ’97 conference and heard a speaker repeatedly characterize intellectual property rights as “ornery.” Ornery seemed a curious word to use to describe this law. It evinces impatience and implicitly accuses its subject of stubbornness. A mule that won’t budge when you want it to take you back up to the top of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is acting ornery. I admit that intellectual property rights are complicated, but I don’t think of them as ornery. In the nearly three centuries of its existence, copyright law has evolved an intricate architecture that provides different scopes of protection for different classes of works. The architecture of copyright is complex in part because of historical happenstance, but much of its complexity is the