Intellectual Property and the "Information Society" Metaphor Today the talk about the so-called "information society" is ubiquitous. By many it is considered as the successor of the industrial society and said to represent a new form of societal and economical organization. This claim is based on the argument, that the information society uses a new kind of resource, which fundamentally differentiates from that of its industrial counterpart. Whereas industrial societies focus on physical objects, the information society's raw material is said to be knowledge and information. Yet the conception of the capitalist system, which underlies industrial societies, also continues to exist in an information-based environment. Although there have been changes in the forms of manufacture, the relations of production remain organized on the same basis. The principle of property. In the context of a capitalist system based on industrial production the term property predominantly relates to material goods. Still even as in an information society the raw materials, resources and products change, the concept of property persists. It merely is extended and does no longer solely consider physical objects as property, but also attempts to put information into a set of property relations. This new kind of knowledge-based property is widely referred to as "intellectual property". Although intellectual property in some ways represents a novel form of property, it has quickly been integrated in the traditional property framework. Whether material or immaterial products, within the capitalist system they are both treated the same - as property.

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The Piracy "Industry" Until recent years, the problem of piracy (the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of copyrighted works (for commercial purposes)) was largely confined to the copying and physical distribution of tapes, disks and CDs. Yet the emergence and increased use of global data networks and the WWW has added a new dimension to the piracy of intellectual property by permitting still easier copying, electronic sales and transmissions of illegally reproduced copyrighted works on a grand scale. This new development, often referred to as Internet piracy, broadly relates to the use of global data networks to 1) transmit and download digitized copies of pirated works, 2) advertise and market pirated intellectual property that is delivered on physical media through the mails or other traditional means, and 3) offer and transmit codes or other technologies which can be used to circumvent copy-protection security measures. Lately the International Intellectual Property Alliance has published a new report on the estimated trade losses due to piracy. (The IIPA assumes that their report actually underestimates the loss of income due to the unlawful copying and distribution of copyrighted works. Yet it should be taken into consideration that the IIPA is the representative of the U.S. core copyright industries (business software, films, videos, music, sound recordings, books and journals, and interactive entertainment software).) Table: IIPA 1998 - 1999 Estimated Trade Loss due to Copyright Piracy (in millions of US$) Motion Pictures Records & Music Business Applications Entertainment Software Books 1999 1998 1999 1998 1999 1998 1999 1998 1999 1998 Total Losses 1323 1421 1684 1613 3211 3437 3020 2952 673 619 Total Losses (core copyright industries) 1999 1998 9910.0 10041.5

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Framing Framing is the practice of creating a frame or window within a web page where the content of a different web page can be display. Usually when a link is clicked on, the new web page is presented with the reminders of the originating page.

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Machine vision A branch of artificial intelligence and image processing concerned with the identification of graphic patterns or images that involves both cognition and abstraction. In such a system, a device linked to a computer scans, senses, and transforms images into digital patterns, which in turn are compared with patterns stored in the computer's memory. The computer processes the incoming patterns in rapid succession, isolating relevant features, filtering out unwanted signals, and adding to its memory new patterns that deviate beyond a specified threshold from the old and are thus perceived as new entities.

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