Commercial vs. Independent Content: Power and Scope Regarding the dimension of their financial and human resources commercial media companies are at any rate much more powerful players than their independent counterparts. Still those reply with an extreme multiplicity and diversity. Today thousands of newsgroups, mailing-list and e-zines covering a wide range of issues from the environment to politics, social and human rights, culture, art and democracy are run by alternative groups. Moreover independent content provider have started to use digital media for communication, information and co-ordination long before they were discovered by corporate interest. They regularly use the Internet and other networks to further public discourse and put up civic resistance. And in many cases are very successful with their work, as initiatives like widerst@ndMUND's (AT) co-ordination of the critics of the participation of the Freedom Party in the Austrian government via mailing-lists, an online-magazine and discussion forums, show.

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Doubls Bind Messages Double bind messages are extremely effective. For example in Nicaragua the Sandinistas were seen as the personification of the evil. Demonization was the tool to make the U.S.-population to believe that. And the propaganda, called "Operation Truth", succeeded - and is successful until today. The Sandinistas are still considered an enemy in the head of the people. The media played the role of spreading propaganda - nearly without any criticism. By the end of the 1980s the USA even paid Nicaraguans for voting other parties than the Sandinistas. El Salvador was a similar case. Again the guerrilla got demonized. The difference was the involvement of the Catholic Church, which was highly fought against by the ruling parties of El Salvador - and those again were financially and organizationally supported by the USA. The elections in the 1980s were more or less paid by the USA. U.S.-politicians were afraid El Salvador could end up being a second Cuba or Nicaragua. Every means was correct to fight this tendency, no matter what it cost. On the 21st of September 1996, the Washington Post published several documents proofing an old rumor: not only that Central American soldiers had been educated in a U.S.-army school (the SOA), they also were taught to use torture as a method against revolutionaries. Some of the Salvadorian "students" of that school became very famous for being extremely cruel, one of them being General Roberto d'Aubuisson (35), the person who ordered the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.

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Public Relations and Propaganda Public relations usually is associated with the influencing of public opinion. Therefore it has subsequently been linked with propaganda. Using one of the many definitions of propaganda "... the manipulation of symbols as a means of influencing attitudes on controversial matters" (Harold D. Lasswell), the terms propaganda and PR seem to be easily interchangeable. Still many authors explicitly distinguish between public relations, advertising and propaganda. Unlike PR, which is often described as objective and extensive information of the public, advertising and propaganda are associated with manipulative activities. Nevertheless to treat public relations and propaganda as equivalents stands in the tradition of PR. Edward L. Bernays, one of the founders of public relations wrote "The only difference between propaganda and education, really, is the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don't believe is propaganda." Also institutions like the German Bundeswehr use the terms publics relations and propaganda synonymously. After a 1990 legislation of the former minister of defense Stoltenberg, the "psychological influence of the enemy" was ceased during peace time and the Academy for Psychological Defense renamed to Academy for Information and Communication, among other things responsible for scientific research in the field of public relations.

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Royalties Royalties refer to the payment made to the owners of certain types of rights by those who are permitted by the owners to exercise the rights. The rights concerned are literary, musical, and artistic copyright and patent rights in inventions and designs (as well as rights in mineral deposits, including oil and natural gas). The term originated from the fact that in Great Britain for centuries gold and silver mines were the property of the crown and such "royal" metals could be mined only if a payment ("royalty") were made to the crown.

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Computer programming language A computer programming language is any of various languages for expressing a set of detailed instructions for a digital computer. Such a language consists of characters and rules for combining them into symbols and words.

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Invention According to the WIPO an invention is a "... novel idea which permits in practice the solution of a specific problem in the field of technology." Concerning its protection by law the idea "... must be new in the sense that is has not already been published or publicly used; it must be non-obvious in the sense that it would not have occurred to any specialist in the particular industrial field, had such a specialist been asked to find a solution to the particular problem; and it must be capable of industrial application in the sense that it can be industrially manufactured or used." Protection can be obtained through a patent (granted by a government office) and typically is limited to 20 years.

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Technological measures As laid down in the proposed EU Directive on copyright and related rights in the information society technological measures mean "... any technology, device, or component that, in the normal course of its operations, is designed to prevent or inhibit the infringement of any copyright..." The U.S. DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) divides technological measures in two categories: 1) measures that prevent unauthorized access to a copyrighted work, and 2) measures that prevent unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work. Also the making or selling of devices or services that can be used to circumvent either category of technological measures is prohibited under certain circumstances in the DMCA. Furthermore the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty states that the "... contracting parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors..."

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