Of IVY Leagues and Intercoms

In the last issue of CyberStage (Issue 2.1, Fall 1995) Paul Hoffert discussed his new role as chairman of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) and some of the new directions in which it will be headed. Here, in the second of an exclusive two-part interview, Hoffert shares some of his thoughts of two projects currently under way at The Cultech Collaborative Research Centre, of which he is the founder and director.

Paul Hoffert comes across as a gentle giant with enough coolness and hip to make even Brad Pitt quiver. Witness some of the 52-year old's achievements in Canada: ex-keyboardist for the highly famed 1970s band Lighthouse, which won three Junos and went on to produce eight gold and platinum records; inductee into the Canadian Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame; chairman of the board at the Ontario Arts Council; and director of the Cultech Collaborative Research Program at York University in Toronto.

It is this last claim to fame which takes up most of Hoffert's time these days. According to its director, Cultech is "...interested in finding out about socialization, about privacy, about a lot of these people-oriented things which are connected with technology but tend to be thought of as very separate and sometimes very antagonistic."

Interactive Communities
Cultech, which makes its home out of York University in Toronto's north end, was created out of the university's desire to attract more private sector funding. After teaching music at the undergraduate level at York, Hoffert was contracted to come up with a plan for such a program. "Cultech," with about a dozen ongoing projects in progress at any given time, became an opportunity to bridge the gap between private-sector resources and research-centre know-how. One of its first projects was management of an information highway test site and interactive community called Intercom Ontario.

"Intercom Ontario was the first trial anywhere in the world to deliver, back in January of 1995, videophones and videomail and collaborative work in videoconferencing, first to a hundred students at York University, and then in September of 1995 to a new suburb in Newmarket, Ontario. All the homes will be connected to the Universities and the Toronto area colleges and the library systems," describes Hoffert.

The public has reacted well to this new housing development in Newmarket, called Stonehaven West. With 111 homes up for sale in September, Stonehaven West sold 39% of them, ranking it second among the five leading new home sites in the Northern Toronto region. Dan Halbert, one of the principals of the new community, reported that "the very first person who walked into the Stonehaven West Sales and Information Centre turned to our sales representative and asked, 'What's the bandwidth?'" Halbert adds, "There is no doubt that the technological capabilities we are providing are seen as a tremendous added value by the home buying public."

In order to ensure Intercom Ontario's success, Cultech was able to convince many competing corporations and organizations to work together with Cultech in providing services and technologies. Says Hoffert, "We have over seventy organization involved in our not-for-profit consortium. They range from broadcasters like the CBC, CITY-TV, TVOntario; to advertising agencies; to Canada Trust [and] Bayshore Trust financial institutions; Canada Post, Ontario Hydro; all the copyright collectives, the actor's association, ACTRA, the Canadian Record Industries Association; SOCAN, the musical rights association. Bell Canada is a key member as well as is Apple Computer and Silicon Graphics and IBM. In Ontario, we are doing the most comprehensive trial of delivering true broadband products similar to those happening anywhere in the world. So we've really got a lot of competitors working together to try to find away, on a very small scale, to figure out a way to get this whole thing to work." These participants plan to spend a total of $111 million between the two interactive community experiments at York University and Stonehaven West.

Copyrights in Crisis
In addition to the Intercom project, the other hot ticket on the Cultech bill is an intellectual property system that allows people to build multimedia works and deliver them through networks while allowing users to clear the rights. "That system is called IVY," says Hoffert, "and will go into operation as the first anywhere in the world."

IVY is a copyright authoring tool which, in many ways, is the first attempt at dealing with the copyright and intellectual property mess with which producers and artists alike are dealing with when producing works on digital systems which are then distributed through broadband media. Wide area global networks like the Internet allow a browser to download and use a work by an artist with nothing built-in to protect the artist against copyright infringement, appropriation, or unauthorized use due to absence of royalty payments. The most common response to this predicament is, "If you don't want your work abused, don't contribute it." This sentiment has resulted in many artists not contributing their work to wide distribution media, including the Internet, CD-ROMs, and potential home-delivery systems such as the ones created for Stonehaven West.

IVY would allow artists to designate what they do and not want their work used in. "IVY completely tracks all usage, and we based this on a couple of things that are pretty reasonable," explains Hoffert. "One is the [development of] technology for all of the copy prohibitions and protections and authorizations; and the second is [the use of] contract law instead of copyright law. So if you had an intellectual property, you could register it in the IVY system. Under certain conditions, you would allow your work to be used by the general public, but under other conditions you would be willing to have your work incorporated into a multimedia new work." IVY then administers payment based on how the end-user uses your work. Adds Hoffert, "It can collapse into situations where the terms of using your work are that you don't want to get paid or don't need to get paid or you don't care, but they can also be whatever terms you want, which could be a very heavy payment."

One factor which IVY must deal with is how various distribution chain participants are to be authenticated, ie, how does IVY know that the person claiming to be user "Laura-who-lives-on Maple-Street" is really the person she says she is. The authentication and security methods being implemented in IVY are similar to the Kerberos system developed by Project Athena at MIT's Media Lab. Once the identity of the user has been confirmed, the IVY system authorizes their use and/or purchase of specific properties.

The network would authorize the connection of servers to it and the servers in turn would rent media space to authorized retailers who upload their content to the servers. The financial clearing house would then authorize both users (credit or debit accounts) and retailers (merchant ID number). In addition, the rights agency must authorize both the retailer and the user by sending appropriate decryption keys for the content.

Is Cultech planning on positioning IVY as worldwide model for dealing with copyright issues in new media? "Absolutely," says Hoffert. "We're in constant contact with the registrar of copyrights in the United States. I just came back from Mexico City where there was a conference of the World Intellectual Property Organization, an arm of the U.N. We have modified our system which was originally geared to clearing rights for a user on an Intercom-like system -- broadband system -- so that it can now accommodate somebody who wants to make a multimedia work like a CD-ROM and doesn't have a vehicle to clear the rights. IVY is a model, and we're putting it forward [as such]. We'll find out how well it works. We put together the copyright collectives and the rights holders that nobody else in the world was able to get to sit at the same table and they said, 'Okay, we gotta figure something out because if we don't, then nobody will be able to do anything.'"

Paul Hoffert cannot be accused of insufficiently undertaking the complex and challenging issues that the intersection of culture and technology present. Having already been a successful musician with many different projects, his awareness of the role of the artist is at the forefront in much of his work. "History shows us that the use of new media generally take a long time to find new uses," he says, "and is in ways that people don't generally imagine. So there's a real role for artists to play."