Extract of Disney’s Content Production and Distribution Holdings

Although the traditional media companies first steps into the digital sphere were fairly clumsy, they have quickly learned from their mistakes and continued to enlarge their Internet presence. Time Warner now for instance operates about 130 Web-Sites (http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/pubarchive/websites.html). Anyhow the stronger online-engagement of the big media conglomerates by 1998 has led to the establishment of a new pattern: "More than three-quarters of the 31 most visited news and entertainment websites were affiliated with large media firms, and most of the rest were connected to outfits like AOL and Microsoft." (Broadcasting and Cable, 6/22/98).

During the last years many of the smaller players in the field of digital media have been driven out of competition by the huge media conglomerates. This mainly is a result of the advantages that the commercial media giants have over their less powerful counterparts:

    As engagement in online activities mostly does not lead to quick profits, investors must be able to take losses, which only powerful companies are able to.



    Traditional media outlets usually have huge stocks of digital programming, which they can easily plug into the Internet at little extra cost.



    To generate audience, the big media conglomerates constantly promote their Websites and other digital media products on their traditional media holdings.



    As possessors of the hottest "brands" commercial media companies often get premier locations from browser software makers, Internet service providers, search engines and portals.



    Having the financial resources at their disposition the big media firms are aggressive investors in start-up Internet media companies.



Commercial media companies have close and long ties to advertisers, which enables them to seize most of these revenues.

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Enforcement: Copyright Management and Control Technologies

With the increased ease of the reproduction and transmission of unauthorized copies of digital works over electronic networks concerns among the copyright holder community have arisen. They fear a further growth of copyright piracy and demand adequate protection of their works. A development, which started in the mid 1990s and considers the copyright owner's apprehensions, is the creation of copyright management systems. Technological protection for their works, the copyright industry argues, is necessary to prevent widespread infringement, thus giving them the incentive to make their works available online. In their view the ideal technology should be "capable of detecting, preventing, and counting a wide range of operations, including open, print, export, copying, modifying, excerpting, and so on." Additionally such systems could be used to maintain "records indicating which permissions have actually been granted and to whom".

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History: "Indigenous Tradition"

In preliterate societies the association of rhythmic or repetitively patterned utterances with supernatural knowledge endures well into historic times. Knowledge is passed from one generation to another. Similar as in the Southern tradition intellectual property rights are rooted in a concept of 'collective' or 'communal' intellectual property existing in perpetuity and not limited to the life of an individual creator plus some number of years after his or her death. Often rights are exercised by only one individual in each generation, often through matrilineal descent.


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Writing

Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.

Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.

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ARPAnet

ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research.

In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.

But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.

Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net.

In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.

Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.

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WIPO

The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN), which was designed to promote the worldwide protection of both industrial property (inventions, trademarks, and designs) and copyrighted materials (literary, musical, photographic, and other artistic works). It was established by a convention signed in Stockholm in 1967 and came into force in 1970. The aims of WIPO are threefold. Through international cooperation, WIPO promotes the protection of intellectual property. Secondly, the organization supervises administrative cooperation between the Paris, Berne, and other intellectual unions regarding agreements on trademarks, patents, and the protection of artistic and literary work and thirdly through its registration activities the WIPO provides direct services to applicants for, or owners of, industrial property rights.

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