Perhaps you’ll also want to see a detailed electronic version of my TeleRead proposal for a well-stocked, cost-justified national digital library. It could let ordinary readers dial up the _entire_ texts of copyrighted books from home for free without cheating publishers and writers. For more on TeleRead, check out the hyperlinked Net incarnation of my chapter in a forthcoming book _Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier_ (Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1995): http://www.clark.net/rothman/pub/telhome.html Bashing technology, of course, is hardly new. In 1854 a writer complained: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” He said that “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through to the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”[1.8] Henry David Thoreau was the writer and the words appeared in _Walden_. Does their source, however, make them less dubious? Hardly. Imagine America without the telegraph—without an opportunity to forge lucrative commercial ties with the Old World, or to strengthen Texas’s ties to Washington. As it turned out, Texas and the rest of the country had plenty to say. So did railroad employees talking to each other; companies could more easily use single tracks to handle traffic in both directions, knowing that the telegraph was there to handle scheduling.[1.9] In other fields, such as medicine, the telegraph undoubtedly hastened progress as well. It also helped friends and families keep in touch as the country was settled; today the Net does the same with people in this era of international travel. Technology, then, while ripe with opportunities for abuse, can do far more than recruit “Girls of the Net” or spread word of a princess’s whooping cough. Ironically, if the Cliff Stolls prevail, and if too many white hats abandon the nets as “devoid of warmth and human kindness,” then his predictions _will_ come to pass; the greedy will take over, confident that others won’t mind so much.