Basics: Acquisition of Copyright

The laws of almost all countries provide that protection is independent of any formalities. Copyright protection then starts as soon as the work is created.

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Bureaucratic data bunkers



Among the foremost of the data bunkers government bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are the oldest forms of bunkers and are today deeply engrained in modern societies. Bureaucracies have always had the function of collecting and administering the data of subjects. What make this process more problematic in the age of ICT is that a lot more data can be collected, they can be collected in clandestine ways (e.g. in surveillance situations), and the can be combined and merged using advanced data mining technologies. In addition, there is a greater rationale for official data collecting, as a lot more data is required for the functioning of public administration as in previous periods, as societies rush to adopt increasingly complex technologies, above all ICTs. The increasing complexity of modern societies means that an increasing number of bureaucratic decision is taken, all of which require a calculation process. Complexity, viewed through government spectacles, generates insecurity - a great deal of the bureaucratic activity therefore revolves around the topic of security.

In spite of the anti-bureaucratic rhetoric of most governments, these factors provides the bureaucracies with an increased hold on society. Foremost bureaucratic data bunkers include the following:

    Law enforcement agencies

    Fiscal agencies

    Intelligence agencies

    Social welfare agencies

    Social insurance institutions

    Public health agencies

    Educational institutions



These are agencies that enjoy the privileged protection of the state. Those among them that operate in the field of security are further protected against public scrutiny, as they operate in an area to which democratic reason has no access.

What makes the data repositories of these institutions different from private data bunkers is their "official", i.e. their politically binding and definitive character. CAE speak of the bureaucracy as a "concrete form of uninterruptible, official and legitimised memory."

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Recent "Digital Copyright" Legislation: U.S.

DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)

The debates in the House and Senate preceding the signing into law of the DMCA by U.S. President Clinton in October 1998 indicated that the principal object of the Act is to promote the U.S. economy by establishing an efficient Internet marketplace in copyrighted works. The DMCA implements the two 1996 WIPO treaties (WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and WIPO Copyright Treaty) and addresses a variety of issues that arose with the increased availability of content in digital form. The Act 1) creates a series of "safe harbor" defenses (which are subject to a variety of conditions that must be met) for certain common activities of ISPs (Internet Service Provider), 2) bars the circumvention of technological protection measures that protect copyrighted works, 3) prohibits the distribution or provision of false copyright management information with the intent to induce or conceal infringement, 4) establishes an exemption for making a copy of a computer program for purposes of maintenance or repair, and 5) contains provisions concerning the "webcasting" of sound recordings on the Internet and the making of (digital) copies of copyrighted works by nonprofit libraries and archives.

A full-text version of the DMCA is available from:
The Library of Congress: Thomas (Legislative Information on the Internet): http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/z?cp105:hr796:

Moreover the U.S. Copyright Office provides a memorandum, which briefly summarizes each of the five titles of the DMCA (pdf format): http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf

The DMCA has been criticized for not clarifying the range of legal principles on the liability of ISPs and creating exceptions to only some of the provisions; therefore giving copyright owners even more rights.

Among the variety of comments on the DMCA are:

Lutzker, Arnold P.: Primer on the Digital Millennium: What the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act Mean for the Library Community. http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/primer.html

Lutzker & Lutzker law firm and the Association of Research Libraries: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Highlights of New Copyright Provision Establishing Limitation of Liability for Online Service Providers. http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/osp.html

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Databody economy and the surveillance state

Databody economy Surveillance state
Promise Reality Promise Reality
universal prosperity universal commercialisation total security total control
frictionless market pacified society political harmony death of democracy


The glamour of the data body economy clouds economic practices which are much less than glamorous. Through the seizure of the data body, practices that in the real political arena were common in the feudal age and in the early industrial age are being reconstructed. The data body economy digitally reconstructs exploitative practices such as slavery and wage labour. However, culturally the data body is still a very new phenomenon: mostly, people think if it does not hurt, it cannot be my body. Exploitation of data bodies is painless and fast. Nevertheless, this can be expected to change once the awareness of the political nature of the data body becomes more widespread. As more and more people routinely move in digitised environments, it is to be expected that more critical questions will be asked and claims to autonomy, at present restricted to some artistic and civil society groups trying to get heard amidst the deafening noise of the commercial ICT propaganda, will be articulated on a more general level.

The more problematic aspect of this development may be something else: the practices of the data body economy, themselves a reconstruction of old techniques of seizure, have begun to re-colonise real political space. Simon Davis, Director of the London-based privacy campaigners Privacy International, one of the foremost critics of modern-day technologies of surveillance and data capturing, has warned against the dangers of a loss of autonomy and undermining of civic rights that are being generated when workplaces are clogged with digital equipment allowing the constant monitoring and surveillance of workers. Unless current trends towards data capturing remain unchecked, the workplace of the future will have many features of the sinister Victorian workhouses that appear Charles Dickens novels, where any claims for autonomy were silenced with references to economic efficiency, and the required discipline imposed by a hierarchy of punishments.

The constant adaptation process required from the modern individual has anonymised and structuralized punishment, which now appears in the guise of error messages and the privatisation of risk.

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Copyright Management and Control Systems: Pre-Infringement

Pre-infringement copyright management and control systems that inhibit or control infringement of intellectual property may be put into place by copyright owners before distributing their works. Examples are:

Contracts

Contracts are a pre-infringement control method, which very often is underestimated. Properly formed contracts enable copyright holders to restrict the use of their works in excess of the rights granted under copyright laws.

Copy Protection

This approach was standard in the 1980s, but rejected by consumers and relatively easy to break. Still copy protection, whereby the vendor limits the number of times a file can be copied, is used in certain situations.

Limited Functionality

This method allows copyright owners to provide a copy of the work, which is functionally limited. Software creators, for example, can distribute software that cannot print or save. A fully functional version has to be bought from the vendor.

Date Bombs

Here the intellectual property holder distributes a fully functional copy but locks off access at a pre-specified date or after a certain number of uses.

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Operating the net: overview

The Net consists of thousands of thousands of governmental and private networks linked together. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way of ever gaining ultimate control of the Internet. Although each of these networks is operated and controlled by an organization, no single organization operates and controls the Net. Instead of a central authority governing the Net, several bodies assure the operability of the Net by developing and setting technical specifications for the Net and by the control of the technical key functions of the Net as the coordination of the domain name system and the allocation of IP numbers.

Originally, the Net was a research project funded and maintained by the US Government and developed in collaboration by scientists and engineers. As the standards developed for ensuring operability ensued from technical functionality, technical coordination gradually grew out of necessity and was restricted to a minimum and performed by volunteers.

Later, in the 1980s, those occupied with the development of technical specifications organized themselves under the umbrella of the Internet Society in virtual organizations as the Internet Engineering Task Force, which were neither officially established nor being based on other structures than mailing lists and commitment, but nonetheless still serve as task forces for the development of standards ensuring the interoperability on the Net.

Since the late 80s and the early 90s, with the enormous growth of the Net - which was promoted by the invention of Local Area Networks, the creation of the World Wide Web, the increased use of personal computers and the connecting of corporations to the Net, just to name a few - coordination of some technical key functions as the domain name system was handed over to corporations as Network Solutions Inc.

Since the year 2000, a new model for technical coordination has been emerging: Formerly performed by several bodies, technical coordination is transferred to a single non-governmental organization: the Internet Coordination of Assigned Numbers and Names.

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Basics: Protected Persons

Generally copyright vests in the author of the work. Certain national laws provide for exceptions and, for example, regard the employer as the original owner of a copyright if the author was, when the work was created, an employee and employed for the purpose of creating that work. In the case of some types of creations, particularly audiovisual works, several national laws provide for different solutions to the question that should be the first holder of copyright in such works.

Many countries allow copyright to be assigned, which means that the owner of the copyright transfers it to another person or entity, which then becomes its holder. When the national law does not permit assignment it usually provides the possibility to license the work to someone else. Then the owner of the copyright remains the holder, but authorizes another person or entity to exercise all or some of his rights subject to possible limitations. Yet in any case the "moral rights" always belong to the author of the work, whoever may be the owner of the copyright (and therefore of the "economic rights").


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How the Internet works

On the Internet, when you want to retrieve a document from another computer, you request a service from this computer. Your computer is the client, the computer on which the information you want to access is stored, is called the server. Therefore the Internet's architecture is called client-server architecture.

A common set of standards allows the exchange of data and commands independent from locations, time, and operating systems through the Internet. These standards are called communication protocols, or the Internet Protocol Suite, and are implemented in Internet software. Sometimes the Internet Protocol Suite is erroneously identified with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol).

Any information to be transferred is broken down into pieces, so-called packets, and the Internet Protocol figures out how the data is supposed to get from A to B by passing through routers.

Each packet is "pushed" from router to router via gateways and might take a different route. It is not possible to determine in advance which ways these packets will take. At the receiving end the packets are checked and reassembled.

The technique of breaking down all messages and requests into packets has the advantage that a large data bundle (e.g. videos) sent by a single user cannot block a whole network, because the bandwidth needed is deployed on several packets sent on different routes. Detailed information about routing in the Internet can be obtained at http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~jphb/comms/iproute.html.

One of the Internet's (and of the Matrix's) beginnings was the ARPANet, whose design was intended to withstand any disruption, as for example in military attacks. The ARPANet was able to route data around damaged areas, so that the disruption would not impede communication. This design, whith its origin in strategic and military considerations, remained unchanged for the Internet. Yet the design of the ARPANet's design cannot be completely applied to the Internet.

Routing around depends on the location of the interruption and on the availability of intersecting points between networks. If, for example, an E-mail message is sent from Brussels to Athens and in Germany a channel is down, it will not affect access very much, the message will be routed around this damage, as long as a major Internet exchange is not affected. However, if access depends on a single backbone connection to the Internet and this connection is cut off, there is no way to route around.

In most parts of the world the Internet is therefore vulnerable to disruption. "The idea of the Internet as a highly distributed, redundant global communications system is a myth. Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth isn't that great," says Douglas Barnes. These bottlenecks are the network connections to neighboring countries. Many countries rely on a one single connection to the Net, and in some places, such as the Suez Canal, there is a concentration of fiber-optic cables of critical importance.

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History: European Tradition

Only in Roman times the first rights referring to artistic works appeared. Regulations resembling a lasting exclusive right to copy did not occur until the 17th century. Before copyright was a private arrangement between guilds able to reproduce copies in commercial quantities.

In France and Western European countries "droits d'auteur" or author's rights is the core of what in the Anglo-American tradition is called copyright. Such rights are rooted in the republican revolution of the late 18th century, and the Rights of Man movement. Today in the European system the creator is front and center; later exploiters are only secondary players.

France

During the 18th century France gradually lost the ability to restrict intellectual property. Before the Revolution, all books, printers and booksellers had to have a royal stamp of approval, called a "privilege". In return for their lucrative monopoly, the French guild of printers and booksellers helped the police to suppress anything that upset royal sensibilities or ran contrary to their interests. Still there were also a whole lot of underground printers who flooded the country with pirated, pornographic and seditious literature. And thousands of writers, most at the edge of starvation.

In 1777 the King threatened the monopoly by reducing the duration of publisher's privileges to the lifetime of the authors. Accordingly a writer's work would go into the public domain after his death and could be printed by anyone. The booksellers fought back by argumenting that, no authority could take their property from them and give it to someone else. Seven months later, in August 1789, the revolutionary government ended the privilege system and from that time on anyone could print anything. Early in 1790 Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet proposed giving authors power over their own work lasting until ten years after their deaths. The proposal - the basis for France's first modern copyright law - passed in 1793.

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Copyright Management and Control Systems: Metering

Metering systems allow copyright owners to ensure payment to or at the time of a consumer's use of the work. Those technologies include:

Hardware Devices

Those have to be acquired and installed by the user. For example under a debit card approach, the user purchases a debit card that is pre-loaded with a certain amount of value. After installation, the debit card is debited automatically as the user consumes copyrighted works.

Digital Certificates

Hereby a certification authority issues to a user an electronic file that identifies the user as the owner of a public key. Those digital certificates, besides information on the identity of the holder can also include rights associated with a particular person. Vendors can so control access system resources, including copyrighted files, by making them available only to users who can provide a digital certificate with specified rights (e.g. access, use, downloading).

Centralized Computing

Under this approach all of the executables remain at the server. Each time the executable is used, the user's computer must establish contact with the server, allowing the central computer to meter access.

Access Codes

Access code devices permit users to "unlock" protective mechanisms (e.g. date bombs or functional limitations) embedded in copyrighted works. Copyright owners can meter the usage of their works, either by unlocking the intellectual property for a one-time license fee or by requiring periodic procurement of access codes.

Copyright Clearinghouses

Under this approach copyright owners would commission "clearinghouses" with the ability to license the use of their works. A user would pay a license fee to obtain rights concerning the intellectual property.


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Internet services

The Internet can be used in in different ways: for distributing and retrieving information, for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication, and for the access services. Accordingly, there are different services on offer. The most important of these are listed below.

Telnet

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Electronic Messaging (E-Mail)

World Wide Web (WWW)

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Multiple User Dimensions (MUDs)

Gopher

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Recent "Digital Copyright" Legislation: European Union

Directive on Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society

In November 1996 the European Commission adopted a communication concerning the follow-up to the Green Paper on copyright and related rights in the information society. The proposed Directive aims at transposing into Community law the main international obligations arising from the two treaties on copyright and related rights adopted within the framework of the WIPO in December 1996 (WIPO Performances and Phonogram Treaty and WIPO Copyright Treaty). It applies to provisions relating to:

- the legal protection of computer programs

- rental right, lending right and certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property

- copyright and related rights applicable to broadcasting of programs by satellite and cable retransmission

- the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights

- the legal protection of databases

The proposal was first presented by the Commission in January 1998, amended in May 1999 and currently is at second reading before the Parliament. Final adoption of the Directive could take place at the end of 2000 or the beginning of 2001 respectively.

A full-text version for download (pdf file) of the amended proposal for a Directive on copyright and related rights in the Information Society is available on the website of the European Commission (DG Internal Market): http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/intprop/docs/index.htm

General critique concerning the proposed EU Directive includes:

- Open networks
The new law could require (technological) surveillance of communications to ensure enforcement. Also because Service Providers might be legally liable for transmitting unauthorized copies, the might in turn have to deny access to anybody who could not provide them with financial guaranties or insurance.

- Interoperable systems
The draft could negate the already established right in EU law for software firms to make their systems interoperable with the dominant copyright protected systems. This would be a threat to the democratic and economic rights of users.

- Publicly available information
It is yet unclear whether new legal protections against the bypassing of conditional access technology apply only for content with an exclusive right. If the content is already in the public domain, then there can be no possible violation of copyright law just from gaining access to it.

Comments from the library, archives and documentation community on the amended Directive embrace:

The Library Association
http://www.la-hq.org.uk/directory/prof_issues/dcrris2.html

EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations)
http://www.eblida.org/lobby/position/ampos2fi.htm

Society of Archivists (U.K.) and Public Record Office (U.K.)
http://www.pro.gov.uk/about/copyright/copyrightdraft.htm

EFPICC (European Fair Practices In Copyright Campaign) http://www.eblida.org/efpicc/comments.htm

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Positions Towards the Future of Copyright in the "Digital Age"

With the development of new transmission, distribution and publishing technologies and the increasing digitalization of information copyright has become the subject of vigorous debate. Among the variety of attitudes towards the future of traditional copyright protection two main tendencies can be identified:

Eliminate Copyright

Anti-copyrightists believe that any intellectual property should be in the public domain and available for all to use. "Information wants to be free" and copyright restricts people's possibilities concerning the utilization of digital content. An enforced copyright will lead to a further digital divide as copyright creates unjust monopolies in the basic commodity of the "information age". Also the increased ease of copying effectively obviates copyright, which is a relict of the past and should be expunged.

Enlarge Copyright

Realizing the growing economic importance of intellectual property, especially the holders of copyright (in particular the big publishing, distribution and other core copyright industries) - and therefore recipients of the royalties - adhere to the idea of enlarging copyright. In their view the basic foundation of copyright - the response to the need to provide protection to authors so as to give them an incentive to invest the time and effort required to produce creative works - is also relevant in a digital environment.

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WTO

An international organization designed to supervise and liberalize world trade. The WTO (World Trade Organization) is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947 and liberalized the world's trade over the next five decades. The WTO came into being on Jan. 1, 1995, with 104 countries as its founding members. The WTO is charged with policing member countries' adherence to all prior GATT agreements, including those of the last major GATT trade conference, the Uruguay Round (1986-94), at whose conclusion GATT had formally gone out of existence. The WTO is also responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements. The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.



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Calculator

Calculators are machines for automatically performing arithmetical operations and certain mathematical functions. Modern calculators are descendants of a digital arithmetic machine devised by Blaise Pascal in 1642. Later in the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz created a more advanced machine, and, especially in the late 19th century, inventors produced calculating machines that were smaller and smaller and less and less laborious to use.

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RSA

The best known of the two-key cryptosystems developed in the mid-1980s is the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptoalgorithm, which was first published in April, 1977. Since that time, the algorithm has been employed in the most widely-used Internet electronic communications encryption program, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). It is also employed in both the Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer web browsing programs in their implementations of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and by Mastercard and VISA in the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol for credit card transactions.

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François Duvalier

b. April 14, 1907, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
d. April 21, 1971, Port-au-Prince

By name PAPA DOC, president of Haiti whose 14-year regime was of unprecedented duration in that country. A supporter of President Dumarsais Estimé, Duvalier was appointed director general of the National Public Health Service in 1946. He was appointed underminister of labour in 1948 and the following year became minister of public health and labour, a post that he retained until May 10, 1950, when President Estimé was overthrown by a military junta under Paul E. Magloire, who was subsequently elected president. By 1954 he had become the central opposition figure and went underground. Duvalier was elected president in September 1957. Setting about to consolidate his power, he reduced the size of the army and organized the Tontons Macoutes ("Bogeymen"), a private force responsible for terrorizing and assassinating alleged foes of the regime. Late in 1963 Duvalier moved further toward an absolutist regime, promoting a cult of his person as the semi divine embodiment of the Haitian nation. In April 1964 he was declared president for life. Although diplomatically almost completely isolated, excommunicated by the Vatican until 1966 for harassing the clergy, and threatened by conspiracies against him, Duvalier was able to stay in power longer than any of his predecessors.

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Sony Corporation

Japanese SONY KK, major Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products. Headquarters are in Tokyo. The company was incorporated in 1946 and spearheaded Japan's drive to become the world's dominant consumer electronics manufacturer in the late 20th century. The company was one of the first to recognize the potential of the consumer videotape market. In 1972 it formed an affiliate to market its Betamax colour videocassette system. In 1987-88 Sony purchased the CBS Records Group from CBS Inc., thus acquiring the world's largest record company. It followed that purchase with the purchase in 1989 of Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc.

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Scientology

Official name Church Of Scientology, religio-scientific movement developed in the United States in the 1950s by the author L. Ron Hubbard (1911-86). The Church of Scientology was formally established in the United States in 1954 and was later incorporated in Great Britain and other countries. The scientific basis claimed by the church for its diagnostic and therapeutic practice is disputed, and the church has been criticized for the financial demands that it makes on its followers. From the 1960s the church and various of its officials or former officials faced government prosecutions as well as private lawsuits on charges of fraud, tax evasion, financial mismanagement, and conspiring to steal government documents, while the church on the other hand claimed it was being persecuted by government agencies and by established medical organizations. Some former Scientology officials have charged that Hubbard used the tax-exempt status of the church to build a profitable business empire.

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Roman smoke telegraph network, 150 A.D.

The Roman smoke signals network consisted of towers within 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.

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Microsoft Network

Microsoft Network is the online service from Microsoft Corporation. Although offering direct access to the Internet, mainly proprietary content for entertainment purposes is offered. Best viewed with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

http://www.msn.com

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Proprietary Network

Proprietary networks are computer networks with standards different to the ones proposed by the International Standardization Organization (ISO), the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). Designed to conform to standards implemented by the manufacturer, compatibility to other network standards is not assured.

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Netiquette

Although referred to as a single body of rules, there is not just one Netiquette, but there are several, though overlapping largely. Proposing general guidelines for posting messages to newsgroups and mailing lists and using the World Wide Web and FTP, Netiquettes address civility topics (i.e., avoiding hate speech) and comprise technical advises (i.e., using simple and platform-independent file formats).
Well-known Netiquettes are the Request for Comment #1855 and The Net: User Guidelines and Netiquette by Arlene H. Rinaldi.

ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1855.txt
http://www.fau.edu/netiquette/net/index.html
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Transistor

A transistor is a solid-state device for amplifying, controlling, and generating electrical signals. Transistors are used in a wide array of electronic equipment, ranging from pocket calculators and radios to industrial robots and communications satellites.

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Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is Russian President, Boris Yeltsin's. Until his appointment as Prime Minister in August 1999, he was nearly unknown. He had been working for the Soviet Security Service, the KGB. In July 1998 he took charge of the Federal Security Service, FSB. In March 1999 he became secretary of the Security Council. He has no experience in being at all. Where he demonstrated power until now is the Chechnya War. Soon after the beginning of this 2nd war in the region his popularity rose.

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Amazon.Com

Amazon.Com was one of the first online bookstores. With thousands of books, CDs and videos ordered via the Internet every year, Amazon.Com probably is the most successful Internet bookstore.

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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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Intranet

As a local area network (LAN), an Intranet is a secured network of computers based on the IP protocol and with restricted access.

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Vacuum tube

The first half of the 20th century was the era of the vacuum tube in electronics. This variety of electron tube permitted the development of radio broadcasting, long-distance telephony, television, and the first electronic digital computers. These early electronic computers were, in fact, the largest vacuum-tube systems ever built. Perhaps the best-known representative is the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, completed in 1946).

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Terrestrial antennas

Microwave transmission systems based on terrestrial antennas are similar to satellite transmission system. Providing reliable high-speed access, they are used for cellular phone networks.

The implementation of the Wide Application Protocol (WAP) makes the wireless access to Internet services as E-Mail and even the World Wide Web via cellular phones convenient. Therefore microwave transmission systems become increasingly important.

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National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ)

Incepted in 1971, The NASDAQ Stock Market was the world's first electronic stock market and has since attracted many technology companies from countries all over the world, some of them as legendary as Apple, Inc. and Microsoft, Inc., e.g., to go public.
NASDAQ is the largest stock market in the world.
http://www.nasdaq.com

http://www.nasdaq.com/
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Machine language

Initially computer programmers had to write instructions in machine language. This coded language, which can be understood and executed directly by the computer without conversion or translation, consists of binary digits representing operation codes and memory addresses. Because it is made up of strings of 1s and 0s, machine language is difficult for humans to use.

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International Standardization Organization

ISO (International Organization for Standardization), founded in 1946, is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country. Among the standards it fosters is Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), a universal reference model for communication protocols. Many countries have national standards organizations that participate in and contribute to ISO standards making.

http://www.iso.ch

Source: Whatis.com

http://www.iso.ch/
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Gaius Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a Roman Statesman who came to power through a military career and by buying of votes. His army won the civil war, run over Spain, Sicily and Egypt, where he made Cleopatra a Queen. For reaching even more power he increased the number of senators. But he also organized social measures to improve the people's food-situation. In February 44 BC he did not accept the kingship offered by Marc Anthony, which made him even more popular. One month later he was murdered during a senate sitting.

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Intelsat

Intelsat, the world's biggest communication satellite services provider, is still mainly owned by governments, but will be privatised during 2001, like Eutelsat. A measure already discussed 1996 at an OECD competition policy roundtable in 1996. Signatory of the Intelsat treaty for the United States of America is Comsat, a private company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Additionally Comsat is one of the United Kingdom's signatories. Aggregated, Comsat owns about 20,5% of Intelsat already and is Intelsat's biggest shareholder. In September 1998 Comsat agreed to merge with Lockheed Martin. After the merger, Lockheed Martin will hold at least 49% of Comsat share capital.

http://www.intelsat.int/index.htm

http://www.eutelsat.org/
http://www.oecd.org//daf/clp/roundtables/SATS...
http://www.comsat.com/
http://www.nyse.com/
http://www.comsat.com/
http://www.comsat.com/
http://www.comsat.com/
http://www.comsat.com/
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Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)

Founded in 1973 by 239 banks from 15 countries, SWIFT is responsible for maintaining the world's most important network dedicated to financial transaction processing.
Although facing competition from smart cards, e.g., SWIFT can rely on an increasing clientèle. In September 1999 SWIFT served 6,710 live users in 189 countries.

http://www.swift.com

http://www.swift.com/
INDEXCARD, 23/30
 
Gerard J. Holzmann and Bjoern Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks

This book gives a fascinating glimpse of the many documented attempts throughout history to develop effective means for long distance communications. Large-scale communication networks are not a twentieth-century phenomenon. The oldest attempts date back to millennia before Christ and include ingenious uses of homing pigeons, mirrors, flags, torches, and beacons. The first true nationwide data networks, however, were being built almost two hundred years ago. At the turn of the 18th century, well before the electromagnetic telegraph was invented, many countries in Europe already had fully operational data communications systems with altogether close to one thousand network stations. The book shows how the so-called information revolution started in 1794, with the design and construction of the first true telegraph network in France, Chappe's fixed optical network.

http://www.it.kth.se/docs/early_net/

INDEXCARD, 24/30
 
Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the head of the NSdAP, the National Socialist Workers' Party. Originally coming from Austria, he started his political career in Germany. As the Reichskanzler of Germany he provoked World War II. His hatred against all non-Aryans and people thinking in a different way killed millions of human beings. Disinformation about his personality and an unbelievable machinery of propaganda made an entire people close its eyes to the most cruel crimes on human kind.

INDEXCARD, 25/30
 
Extranet

An Extranet is an Intranet with limited and controlled access by authenticated outside users, a business-to-business Intranet, e.g.

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Memex Animation by Ian Adelman and Paul Kahn


INDEXCARD, 27/30
 
International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC)

The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards.

The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables.

Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members.

http://www.iscpc.org

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The Spot

http://www.thespot.com/

http://www.thespot.com/
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skytale

The skytale (pronunciation: ski-ta-le) was a Spartan tool for encryption. It consisted of a piece of wood and a leather-strip. Any communicating party needed exactly the same size wooden stick. The secret message was written on the leather-strip that was wound around the wood, unwound again and sent to the recipient by a messenger. The recipient would rewound the leather and by doing this enciphering the message.

INDEXCARD, 30/30