As teachers of chemistry, we deal with information, knowledge, and, if we are fortunate, even wisdom. An important part of what we do involves giving students access to information and devising better ways to help them assimilate it. Beyond that, we can help them gain knowledge and understanding. Ultimately we hope that the knowledge they gain will help them to make wise choices about their own and society's collective futures.

We often view ourselves as altruistic providers of information, but of course our students do pay tuition fees and thereby at least part of our salaries. In that sense we can think of ourselves as involved in an information industry. We provide what has come to be called intellectual property in return for a salary from a school, college, or university that in turn has collected fees from those who value that intellectual property. Those of us who write books or create multimedia materials are even more closely allied with the information industry.

Computers and the Internet have produced a quantum jump in the ease of dissemination, reception, and reproduction of large quantities of information. That has stimulated reexamination of conventional thinking about intellectual property, making copyrights, patents, and trademarks a red-hot area for lawyers. Insofar as we teachers are disseminators of intellectual property, we are going to be affected by the changes that will certainly happen in the laws, customs, and ethics that apply to ownership of information and of the means by which it is exchanged among members of our society. In other words, we need to pay attention to the current ferment regarding intellectual property, doing our best to ensure that the decisions made do not prevent us from teaching in the best ways we know.

Available options, all of which have vocal proponents, range from complete freedom of copying and disseminating information through a level of control in which essentially every bit or byte delivered carries with it a fee and a set of restrictions on its use. For example, in the area of Web- delivered courses, we might simply upload materials to the Web for anyone to view, or we might charge for (and restrict viewers to a single use of) chunks of information the size of a textbook section or example problem. The former is roughly analogous to presenting a series of public lectures for no fee, the latter to having a turnstile at the entrance to the lecture hall and requiring that no notes be taken out of the room.

You and I may not have been thinking in these ways, but others have. Whether we like it or not, what they do will affect us. There is considerable pressure, both from without and within, for universities to recognize and capitalize on the fact that they are purveyors of intellectual property. We are being urged to get onto the bandwagon of the "celestial jukebox". On the Web of the future, individuals will have access to great digital warehouses (not libraries, which have a less commercial connotation) packed with peta- or exabytes of information. Quoting from an article by Anne Eisenberg in The New York Times, December 9, 1999, "The idea is that consumers of the future will pay a few dollars or cents - or even a fraction of a cent - to watch an episode of 'I Love Lucy,' listen to an aria by Bryn Terfel or view a missed Chemistry 101 lecture, deliverable on the spot to home or office."

I am personally repelled by the thought that chemistry course materials might be restricted to the degree already provided in "shrinkwrap" and "clickwrap" licenses - those agreements you enter into when you tear the plastic off the disks or CD for a new software program or click to download software from the Internet. (One such license required that the software could not be used to disparage its publisher, and another required prior consent before anyone could publish a review of the software.) These restrictions apply only if you decide to purchase or download the software, but if the only access to information is via the Web, such restrictions could result in a major infringement of rights - one that we might not even realize existed until it was too late.

Complete freedom for anyone to disseminate copies of anything also has drawbacks. Charles C. Mann, writing in The Atlantic Monthly in September 1998, described the chaos that resulted when the French Revolution abolished all restrictions on copying text. Serious books, which were inherently more difficult to produce and which would be expected to be available in print for years, were supplanted by gossipy, libelous pamphlets whose lifetimes were so short that nobody could gain by copying them. The result was that serious books went out of print and intellectual discourse was severely limited.

In these heady times, all of us should vigilantly monitor how proposed changes in copyright, patent, and other laws might affect chemical education. Clearly a system that is intermediate between the extremes just described is preferable to either of them. In next month's editorial I will describe what such a system might involve. I will also provide my thoughts about how this Journal can participate most effectively in helping teachers find and use intellectual property that will help students learn.