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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Intellectual Property: A Definition Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output, which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches: 1) Industrial Property a) Inventions b) Marks (trademarks and service marks) c) Industrial designs d) Unfair competition (trade secrets) e) Geographical indications (indications of source and appellations of origin) 2) Copyright The protection of intellectual property is guaranteed through a variety of laws, which grant the creators of intellectual goods, and services certain time-limited rights to control the use made of their products. Those rights apply to the intellectual creation as such, and not to the physical object in which the work may be embodied.

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Extract of AOL Time Warner’s Content Production and Distribution Holdings The following selection does not claim to present an exhaustive listing, but rather picks some of the company's most important assets. Due to the rapid developments in the world of media giants the list is also subject to changes. Cable TV Systems and Channels/Networks Time Warner Cable has 12.6 million subscribers in the U.S. and also runs 5 local 24-hour news stations. Cable TV channels/networks (some part-owned): HBO, HBO Plus, HBO Signature, HBO Family, HBO Comedy, HBO Zone, Cinemax, MoreMAX, ActionMAX, ThrillerMAX, HBO en Espa-ol, Comedy Central, Court TV, HBO Ole, HBO Asia, HBO Central Europe, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNNfN, CNN/Sports Illustrated, CNN en Espa-ol, CNN Airport Network, CNN Radio, CNN Radio Noticias, CNN Interactive TBS Superstation, Turner Network Television, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies, TNT Europe, Cartoon Network Europe, TNT Latin America, Cartoon Network Latin America, TNT & Cartoon Network/Asia Pacific, CNN+, n-tv Movies, TV, Video Production, and Movie Theaters Warner Bros. film studio Warner Bros. Television production studios Warner Bros. Home Video Turner worldwide Home Video Turner Pictures Castle Rock Entertainment movie production company New Line Cinema movie production company Warner Bros. film library Turner Film Library Hanna Barbera Cartoons Owns many movie houses, with over 1,000 screens, around the world Book Publishing Time Life Inc. Book-of-the-Month Club Warner Books Little, Brown and Company Oxmoor House Leisure Arts Sunset Books Magazines Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Life, Money, Parenting, In Style, Entertainment Weekly, Cooking Light, Baby Talk, First Moments, Coastal Living, Health, Progressive Farmer, Southern Accents, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated, For Kids, Sunset, Teen People, Time for Kids, Weight Watchers, Mutual Funds, Your Company, Asiaweek, President, Wallpaper. Hippocrates Recorded Music Warner Music Group The Atlantic Group Elektra Entertainment Group Rhino Entertainment Sire Records Group Warner Bros. Records Warner Music International WEA Inc. WEA Corp. WEA Manufacturing Ivy Hill Corp. Warner Special Products Alternative Distribution Alliance Giant Merchandising Deals with record labels include: Maverick records Tommy Boy Sub Pop Qwest 143 Records Internet and New Media About 130 Websites including: CNN.com, AllPolitics.com, CNNSI.com, Time Digital, People, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated Turner New Media Online Services including: Compuserve, Netscape, Netcenter Pro Sports Teams and Promotions Atlanta Braves major league baseball team Atlanta Hawks NBA basketball team World Championship Wrestling Goodwill Games Other Six Flags entertainment/excursion parks Warner Bros. Movie World theme park Over 150 Warner Bros. stores, plus Turner Retail Group 25 % stake in Atari 14 % stake in Hasbro Business Connections with Other Media Companies Joint ventures, equity interests or major arrangements with Viacom, Sony, Bertelsmann, News Corp., Kirch, EMI, Tribune Co., and others.

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RTMark and Adbusters at the WTO Conference in Seattle The 1999 WTO (World Trade Organization) Conference in Seattle not only attracted a multitude of demonstrators, but also artistic and cultural activists like RTMark and Adbusters. Adbusters, well known as fighters against corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy and "physical and mental pollution", timely for the WTO Conference purchased three billboards in downtown Seattle. Featuring an image with the text "System Error - Type 2000 (progress)", the billboards were meant to challenge "... the WTO's agenda of global corporate growth and expose what isn't reflected in the United State's GNP - human and environmental capital." At the same time RTMark went on-line with its spoof WTO website http://gatt.org. Shortly after its release WTO Director-General Mike Moore accused RTMark of attempting to "undermine WTO transparency" by copying the WTO website's design and using "domain names such as `www.gatt.org` and page titles such as 'World Trade Organization / GATT Home Page' which make it difficult for visitors to realize that these are fake pages." http://gatt.org is not the first time that RTMark has used website imitation aiming at rendering an entity more transparent. RTMark has performed the same "service" for George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Shell Oil, and others with the principal purpose of publicizing corporate abuses of democratic processes.

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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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Basics: Protected Works Usually the subject matter of copyright is described as "literary and artistic works" - original creations in the fields of literature and arts. Such works may be expressed in words, symbols, pictures, music, three-dimensional objects, or combinations thereof. Practically all national copyright laws provide for the protection of the following types of works: Literary works: novels, poems dramatic works and any other writings, whether published or unpublished; in most countries also computer programs and "oral works" Musical works Artistic works: whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional; irrespective of their content and destination Maps and technical drawings Photographic works: irrespective of the subject matter and the purpose for which made Audiovisual works: irrespective of their purpose, genre, length, method employed or technical process used Some copyright laws also provide for the protection of choreographic works, derivative works (translations, adaptions), collections (compilations) of works and mere data (data bases); collections where they, by reason of the selection and arrangement of the contents, constitute intellectual creations. Furthermore in some countries also "works of applied art" (furniture, wallpaper etc.) and computer programs (either as literary works or independently) constitute copyrightable matter. Under certain national legislations the notion "copyright" has a wider meaning than "author's rights" and, in addition to literary and artistic works, also extends to the producers of sound recordings, the broadcasters of broadcasts and the creators of distinctive typographical arrangements of publications.

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Microsoft Corporation Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and headquartered in Redmond, USA, Microsoft Corporation is today's world-leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. As MS-DOS, the first operating system released by Microsoft, before, Windows, its successor, has become the de-facto standard operating system for personal computer. According to critics and following a recent court ruling this is due to unfair competition. http://www.microsoft.com For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0,5716,1524+1+1522,00.html http://www.microsoft.com/ http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0...

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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/

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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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Adi Shamir Adi Shamir was one of three persons in a team to invent the RSA public-key cryptosystem. The other two authors were Ron Rivest and Leonard M. Adleman.

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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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World Wide Web (WWW) Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible. Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it. Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too. According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000. World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html http://www.searchwords.com/ http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/ http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...

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