Davis didn't exactly envision this high-tech future; he arrived at Corbis through the back door of intellectual property -- as an attorney interested in the process of protecting the copyright of digitally transmitted images. It was Bill Gates who in 1989 founded the company; it is still privately held by the Microsoft mogul. The Corbis archives contain some of the world's most significant and recognizable photography and fine art, including works from Ansel Adams, Galen Rowell and the 17 million historical images of the Bettmann Archive. Its recent acquisition of Sygma, the world's largest news photography agency, suggests that Corbis is positioning itself as a digital platform for real-time news content.

But turning this vast archive into a profitable business seems an odd calling for Davis. His career arc has hardly followed the typical trajectory of a high-tech mover-and-shaker. After undergraduate studies at Princeton, Davis won a fellowship to study Chinese in Taiwan, and spent the next few years wandering through Southeast Asia and Europe, working on international refugee and human rights issues. He returned to the United States for an advanced degree in Chinese studies from the University of Washington in 1984 and then studied for a time in Beijing. Next came a law degree from the Columbia University School of Law, where Davis won the Faculty Prize in International Law for his work on China's legal system. Soon thereafter, he made a nimble leap to the law firm of Bill Gates Sr., which put him in touch with Bill Jr.

What's the connection between Chinese law and digital imagery?

It's not a direct connection. I'd done a lot of work during the 1980s on human rights and refugees and Asia policy but then life took its own course. Quite frankly some of that was due to Tiananmen -- but some of it was due to family interests. The upshot is that I came back to Seattle. And there is not a lot of public law activity in Seattle.

So I decided to step back and try something else for a little while, pursue some other interests. That led to me practicing law in the intellectual property area, a really fascinating, emerging, conflicting area of the law. That must be where the carry-over is; in the refugee and international human rights area, you're always on the policy front line, looking at new issues that are pretty conflicted. To me intellectual property issues are another way to work through conflict, apply some of my strategic and policy thinking to something which I think is very important in the world.

You worked on those intellectual property issues in Bill Gates' father's law firm, didn't you? I have to ask: How far did the acorn fall from the tree?

They're very similar in many ways, I think, in their passion and in their intellect. They share an extraordinary capacity for connecting a lot of pretty complicated dots very quickly. Big Bill has been working in a large community with lots of diverse interests, and that brings a certain wisdom to who he is; his son is a technology-driven visionary. That creates quite a few differences.

Art on the Internet is already significantly different from the original vision of its artist creator, isn't it? When does that manipulation start to compromise the artists' vision -- and "ownership" of a particular image?

The whole issue of alteration and manipulation is a big one. As the technologies evolve, some of the limitations will be overcome by virtue of bandwidth, more sophisticated tools and compression techniques. We're seeing huge improvements in those areas already.

A lot of the photography that we have is intended to be manipulated. A lot of our artists work in the world of commercial photography and that's their intention, to allow people to take a tree and move it or whatever, so we certainly don't want to discourage that. That's also part of putting creativity and the tools in the hands of the people. We do put restrictions on historical and news imagery where we say: This is an accurate news image; you're prohibited from altering it. But that's an age-old problem in the news business. There you have to rely both on enforcement techniques and trust in people.

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