Additionally, standards are still being developed for hardware and user interfaces. While still under development, the uncertainty about the outcome among competing standards causes people to delay technology upgrades. Financial Resources New electronic technology is not cheap. It requires substantial capital outlays to connect and equip users with a minimum standard package of information and communications technologies and to provide the training necessary to exploit these resources. It also requires a substantial ongoing investment in timely and responsive technical support for hardware, software, and network connections.
Financial inequities create widening gaps between the information rich and the information poor.
Additionally, the longer productive researchers and teachers wait to convert text and images from non-digital to digital formats, the more daunting and costly the task appears. Information in disparate media can be converted into a single digital stream and easily manipulated to create a variety of new works. Digitized information can be distributed to and downloaded by thousands of users of the network. We struggle to apply current legal protections to this emerging domain of intellectual property. If implemented, threats to eliminate the fair use exemption in the current Copyright Law would prevent many users from making copies or even reading on-screen materials to which they have access today without paying fees for each use.