The North against the South?

"Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market."
(UNESCO, World Communication Report)

The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else.

Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?

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Basics: Infringement and Fair Use

The rights of a copyright holder are infringed when one of the acts requiring the authorization of the owner is done by someone else without his consent. In the case of copyright infringement or the violation of neighboring rights the remedies for the copyright owner consist of civil redress. The unauthorized copying of protected works for commercial purposes and the unauthorized commercial dealing in copied material is usually referred to as "piracy".

Yet copyright laws also provide that the rights of copyright owners are subject to the doctrine of "fair use". That allows the reproduction and use of a work, notwithstanding the rights of the author, for limited purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and research. Fair use may be described as the privilege to use the copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without the owner's consent. To determine whether a use is fair or not most copyright laws consider:

- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (usually certain types of educational copying are allowed)

- the nature of the copyrighted work (mostly originals made for commercial reasons are less protected than their purely artistic counterparts)

- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (as a general rule copying may be permitted if it is unlikely to cause economic harm to the original author)

Examples of activities that may be excused as fair use include: providing a quotation in a book review; distributing copies of a section of an article in class for educational purposes; and imitating a work for the purpose of parody or social commentary.

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Karl Neupert

In the 1920s the Hollow Earth Theory was very popular in Germany. With the acceptance and support of the NAZI regime Karl Neupert wrote the book Geokosmos. With the help of this book the theory became a cult in Germany.

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First Amendment Handbook

The First Amendment to the US Constitution, though short, lists a number of rights. Only a handful of words refer to freedoms of speech and the press, but those words are of incalculable significance. To understand the current subtleties and controversies surrounding this right, check out this First Amendment site. This detailed handbook of legal information, mostly intended for journalists, should be of interest to anyone who reads or writes. For example, the chapter Invasion of Privacy shows the limits of First Amendment rights, and the balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the public - or, more crudely, the balance of Tabloid vs. Celebrity. Each section is carefully emended with relevant legal decisions.

http://www.rcfp.org/handbook/viewpage.cgi

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