I believe that superdistribution can serve as a new paradigm for the ownership of digital property. By creating a technological basis for buying, selling, and owning goods made of bits, we can move software engineering onto the same growth curve that hardware engineering has occupied since the industrial revolution. By providing a two-tier infrastructure for enforcing ownership of digital property, we can let software engineers assemble their products the same way hardware engineers assemble theirs, building upon other people's efforts instead of fabricating everything from first principles.

Dr. Cox is a faculty member of the George Mason University Program on Social and Organizational Learning (PSOL). PSOL is an interdisciplinary department that concentrates on overcoming socioeeconomic and technical obstacles to change, development and learning as firms transition to a global information-intensive economy. His educational interests are in applying internet, television, and groupware technology to expedite experiential and collaborative learning experiences in the academy, the home, the workplace and the world.

His courses include Taming the Electronic Frontier, Internet Literacy, and Advanced Object Technology which all involve extensive use of distance education technology. He is now developing a new course, Computational Modeling of Social Learning involving evolutionary agent simulations inspired by Michael Rothchild's book, Bionomics, and work at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere.

He authored Object-oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach, a book that is generally credited with launching today's industry-wide enthusiasm for object technology. He has recently completed a second book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier, which proposes superdistribution as a technosocial solution to the problematics of buying, selling and owning property made of bits as distinct from the atoms from which goods have been composed since antiquity.

Dr. Cox founded the Coalition for Electronic Markets whose objective is to build and deploy a nationwide revenue collection infrastructure for commerce in electronic goods. He cofounded the Stepstone Corporation where he originated the Objective-C[TM] programming language and Software-IC[TM] libraries. At Schlumberger-Doll Research, he applied artificial intelligence, object-oriented, Unix, and workstation technologies to oil field wireline services. At the Programming Technology Center at ITT, he applied Unix and object-oriented technologies in support of the development of a large, highly distributed telephone switching system, System 1240.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago for theoretical and experimental work in neurophysiology in an area that has since become known as neural networks. His post-graduate experimental studies were at the National Institutes of Health and at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories.