Challenges for Copyright by ICT: Introduction Traditional copyright and the practice of paying royalties to the creators of intellectual property have emerged with the introduction of the printing press (1456). Therefore early copyright law has been tailored to the technology of print and the (re) production of works in analogue form. Over the centuries legislation concerning the protection of intellectual property has been adapted several times in order to respond to the technological changes in the production and distribution of information. 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.

TEXTBLOCK 1/1 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611725/100438659517

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, 1/1