I think on behalf of my colleagues with the Department of Commerce, we certainly hope to hear of progress, but it is difficult in the current environment to be terribly positive. Piracy continues, and continues to impact the music industry, in particular, where sales have dropped this year by about 5 percent. We're seeing jury trials in Los Angeles involving popular file-sharing services. Demand for broadband continues to be weaker than most of the public and the industry sectors would like to see.

The U.S. telecom sector, of course, is in full scale depression. We have headlines of continued IT layoffs, and less dramatically but importantly, users of LINUX still cannot legally buy DVDs and watch them on their computers, so it's clear that we still face challenges. We will certainly hear divergent perspectives that are difficult to overcome and reconcile.

The environment that I think we all want to pursue, is one that will be supported with continued innovation, one that will provide a consistent, and reliable, and predictable level of legitimate copyright protection, and will, importantly, be responsive to consumers.

In my view, these objectives are equally important, and meeting them in the marketplace is, indeed, possible, but not easy. Visionary technology leaders have continually exceeded our wildest expectations, and indeed since seven months is a relatively long period in technology, we'll look forward to hearing about technological developments even since December. And, of course, consumers' influence has always been really the first and last voice in the marketplace.

While piracy remains a major problem, estimates are that about one-fifth of the U.S. population has downloaded music from file-sharing services. The market for the legitimate sale of content certainly seems to exist. One source has pegged that at about a 2.7 billion dollar market by the year 2007.

When the Technology Administration announced this workshop on July 3rd, we invited public comments on our website, and we've received close to 150 responses from individuals and groups since that point in time. And we have heard a number of very thoughtful comments. I think it's a testament really to the Internet's unprecedented ability to reach broadly to garner input and communication and to empower individuals.

I want to share with you one comment that we had, in part, because it summons up an interesting image, but also because of the point it makes. We're reminded by one commentator that the Internet was created "by the military, crazed anarchists, visionary scientists, and engineers." And while that is certainly an interesting imagine it speaks, I think, to the essence of the media, its innovative legacy, and the responsibility that we all share for its future.

I look forward to the discussion. I'm glad to see an overflow crowd. We are going to continue to take comments through the website, so we will look forward to everybody in the room having an opportunity, and even those not here to have an opportunity to comment....