Following the communist revolutions of the 20th century all "means of production" became the property of the state as representative of "the masses". Private property ceased to exist. While moral rights of the creator were recognized and economic rights acknowledged with a one-time cash award, all subsequent rights reverted to the state.
With the transformation of many communist countries to a market system most of them have now introduced laws establishing markets in intellectual property rights. Still the high rate of piracy reflects a certain lack of legal tradition.
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Traditional copyright and the practice of paying
Yet again new technologies have altered the way of how (copyrighted) works are produced, copied, made obtainable and distributed. The emergence of global electronic networks and the increased availability of digitalized intellectual property confront existing copyright with a variety of questions and challenges. Although the combination of several types of works within one larger work or on one data carrier, and the digital format (although this may be a recent development it has been the object of detailed legal scrutiny), as well as networking (telephone and cable networks have been in use for a long time, although they do not permit interactivity) are nothing really new, the circumstance that recent technologies allow the presentation and storage of text, sound and visual information in digital form indeed is a novel fact. Like that the entire information can be generated, altered and used by and on one and the same device, irrespective of whether it is provided online or offline.
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Fiber-optic cable networks may become the dominant method for high-speed Internet connections. Since the first fiber-optic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1988, the demand for faster Internet connections is growing, fuelled by the growing network traffic, partly due to increasing implementation of corporate networks spanning the globe and to the use of graphics-heavy contents on the
Fiber-optic cables have not much more in common with copper wires than the capacity to transmit information. As copper wires, they can be terrestrial and submarine connections, but they allow much higher transmission rates. Copper wires allow 32 telephone calls at the same time, but fiber-optic cable can carry 40,000 calls at the same time. A capacity,
Copper wires will not come out of use in the foreseeable future because of technologies as
For technical information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on telecommunication cables, click
An entertaining report of the laying of the FLAG submarine cable, up to now the longest fiber-optic cable on earth, including detailed background information on the cable industry and its history, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired: Mother Earth Mother Board. Click
Susan Dumett has written a short history of undersea cables for Pretext magazine, Evolution of a Wired World. Click
A timeline history of submarine cables and a detailed list of seemingly all submarine cables of the world, operational, planned and out of service, can be found on the Web site of the
For maps of fiber-optic cable networks see the website of
Whitfield Diffie is an Engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-author of Privacy on the Line (MIT Press) in 1998 with Susan Landau. In 1976 Diffie and