Legal Protection: TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Another important multilateral treaty concerned with intellectual property rights is the TRIPS agreement, which was devised at the inauguration of the Uruguay Round negotiations of the WTO in January 1995. It sets minimum standards for the national protection of intellectual property rights and procedures as well as remedies for their enforcement (enforcement measures include the potential for trade sanctions against non-complying WTO members). The TRIPS agreement has been widely criticized for its stipulation that biological organisms be subject to intellectual property protection. In 1999, 44 nations considered it appropriate to treat plant varieties as intellectual property. The complete TRIPS agreement can be found on: http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/t_agm1_e.htm

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0 - 1400 A.D. 150 A smoke signals network covers the Roman Empire The Roman smoke signals network consisted of towers within a visible range of each other and had a total length of about 4500 kilometers. It was used for military signaling. For a similar telegraph network in ancient Greece see Aeneas Tacitus' optical communication system. About 750 In Japan block printing is used for the first time. 868 In China the world's first dated book, the Diamond Sutra, is printed. 1041-1048 In China moveable types made from clay are invented. 1088 First European medieval university is established in Bologna. The first of the great medieval universities was established in Bologna. At the beginning universities predominantly offered a kind of do-it-yourself publishing service. Books still had to be copied by hand and were so rare that a copy of a widely desired book qualified for being invited to a university. Holding a lecture equaled to reading a book aloud, like a priest read from the Bible during services. Attending a lecture equaled to copy a lecture word by word, so that you had your own copy of a book, thus enabling you to hold a lecture, too. For further details see History of the Idea of a University, http://quarles.unbc.edu/ideas/net/history/history.html

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Legal Protection: National Legislation Intellectual property - comprising industrial property and copyright - in general is protected by national legislation. Therefore those rights are limited territorially and can be exercised only within the jurisdiction of the country or countries under whose laws they are granted.

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Late 1950s - Early 1960s: Second Generation Computers An important change in the development of computers occurred in 1948 with the invention of the transistor. It replaced the large, unwieldy vacuum tube and as a result led to a shrinking in size of electronic machinery. The transistor was first applied to a computer in 1956. Combined with the advances in magnetic-core memory, the use of transistors resulted in computers that were smaller, faster, more reliable and more energy-efficient than their predecessors. Stretch by IBM and LARC by Sperry-Rand (1959) were the first large-scale machines to take advantage of the transistor technology (and also used assembly language instead of the difficult machine language). Both developed for atomic energy laboratories could handle enormous amounts of data, but still were costly and too powerful for the business sector's needs. Therefore only two LARC's were ever installed. Throughout the early 1960s there were a number of commercially successful computers (for example the IBM 1401) used in business, universities, and government and by 1965 most large firms routinely processed financial information by using computers. Decisive for the success of computers in business was the stored program concept and the development of sophisticated high-level programming languages like FORTRAN (Formular Translator), 1956, and COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), 1960, that gave them the flexibility to be cost effective and productive. The invention of second generation computers also marked the beginning of an entire branch, the software industry, and the birth of a wide range of new types of careers.

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National Science Foundation (NSF) Established in 1950, the National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the U.S. government dedicated to the funding in basic research and education in a wide range of sciences and in mathematics and engineering. Today, the NSF supplies about one quarter of total federal support of basic scientific research at academic institutions. http://www.nsf.gov For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,2450+1+2440,00.html http://www.nsf.gov/

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Montage Certain elements of two or more photographs can be put together, mixed, and the outcome is a new picture. Like this, people can appear in the same picture, even "sit at the same table" though they have never met in reality.

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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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