RTMark and Adbusters at the WTO Conference in Seattle The 1999 WTO (World Trade Organization) Conference in Seattle not only attracted a multitude of demonstrators, but also artistic and cultural activists like RTMark and Adbusters. Adbusters, well known as fighters against corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy and "physical and mental pollution", timely for the WTO Conference purchased three billboards in downtown Seattle. Featuring an image with the text "System Error - Type 2000 (progress)", the billboards were meant to challenge "... the WTO's agenda of global corporate growth and expose what isn't reflected in the United State's GNP - human and environmental capital." At the same time RTMark went on-line with its spoof WTO website http://gatt.org. Shortly after its release WTO Director-General Mike Moore accused RTMark of attempting to "undermine WTO transparency" by copying the WTO website's design and using "domain names such as `www.gatt.org` and page titles such as 'World Trade Organization / GATT Home Page' which make it difficult for visitors to realize that these are fake pages." http://gatt.org is not the first time that RTMark has used website imitation aiming at rendering an entity more transparent. RTMark has performed the same "service" for George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Shell Oil, and others with the principal purpose of publicizing corporate abuses of democratic processes.

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Highlights on the Way to a Global Commercial Media Oligopoly: 1990s -1994 Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion. 1995 Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion. The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion. In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library. 1996 Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations. Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group. Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios. 1997 Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States. Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source. Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group. Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge. 1998 Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations. 1999 AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.

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The 18th Century: Powered Machines and the Industrial Revolution The invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1776 represented a major advance in the development of powered machines. It was first applied to an industrial operation - the spinning of cotton - in 1785. A new kind of work-slave it not only marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but also the coming age of mass production. In the England of the 18th century five important inventions in the textile industry advanced the automation of work processes. 1) John Kay's flying shuttle in 1733 , which permitted the weaving of larger widths of cloth and significantly increased weaving speed, 2) Edmund Cartwright's power loom in 1785, which increased weaving speed still further, 3) James Hargreaves' spinning jenny in 1764, 4) Richard Arkwright's water frame and 5) Samuel Crompton's spinning mule in 1779, whereby the last three inventions improved the speed and quality of thread-spinning operations. Those developments, combined with the invention of the steam engine, in short time led to the creation of new machine-slaves and the mechanization of the production of most major goods, such as iron, paper, leather, glass and bricks. Large-scale machine production was soon applied in many manufacturing sectors and resulted in a reduction of production costs. Yet the widespread use of the novel work-slaves also led to new demands concerning the work force's qualifications. The utilization of machines enabled a differentiated kind of division of labor and eventuated in a (further) specialization of skills. While before many goods were produced by skilled craftsmen the use of modern machinery increased the demand for semiskilled and unskilled workers. Also, the nature of the work process altered from one mainly dependent on physical power to one primarily dominated by technology and an increasing proportion of the labor force employed to operate machines.

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Mark A mark (trademark or service mark) is "... a sign, or a combination of signs, capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings. The sign may particularly consist of one or more distinctive words, letters, numbers, drawings or pictures, emblems, colors or combinations of colors, or may be three-dimensional..." (WIPO) To be protected a mark must be registered in a government office whereby generally the duration is limited in time, but can be periodically (usually every 10 years) renewed.

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Robot Robot relates to any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. The term is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on mechanical workers called robots that are capable of doing any kind of mental or physical work. Modern robot devices descend through two distinct lines of development--the early automation, essentially mechanical toys, and the successive innovations and refinements introduced in the development of industrial machinery.

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Core copyright industries Those encompass the industries that create copyrighted works as their primary product. These industries include the motion picture industry (television, theatrical, and home video), the recording industry (records, tapes and CDs), the music publishing industry, the book, journal and newspaper publishing industry, and the computer software industry (including data processing, business applications and interactive entertainment software on all platforms), legitimate theater, advertising, and the radio, television and cable broadcasting industries.

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