The Big Five of Commercial Media
After a number of mergers and acquisitions five powerful media conglomerates lead the world's content production and distribution. They operate on an international basis with subsidiaries all around the globe and engage in every imaginable kind of media industry.
Table: The World's Leading Media Companies
Media Company
| 1998 Revenues
(in US$)
| Property/Corporate Information
|  AOL Time Warner (US)
| 26,838.000.000*
| http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/timewarnerinc/corporate/index.html
| Disney (US)
| 22,976.000.000
| http://www.disney.com
| Bertelsmann (GER)
| 16,389.000.000
| http://www.bertelsmann.com/facts/report/report.cfm
|  News Corporation (AUS)
| 12,841.000.000
| http://www.newscorp.com/public/cor/cor_m.htm
| Viacom (US)
| 12,100.000.000
| http://www.viacom.com/global.tin
| |
(* Revenues of Time Warner only (merger with AOL took place in January 2000)
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Legal Protection: European Union
Within the EU's goal of establishing a European single market also intellectual property rights are of significance. Therefore the European Commission aims at the harmonization of the respective national laws of the EU member states and for a generally more effective protection of intellectual property on an international level. Over the years it has adopted a variety of Conventions and Directives concerned with different aspects of the protection of industrial property as well as copyright and neighboring rights.
An overview of EU activities relating to intellectual property protection is available on the website of the European Commission (DG Internal Market):  http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/intprop/index.htm
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Reuters Group plc
Founded in 1851 in London, Reuters is the world's largest news and television agency with 1,946 journalists, photographers and camera operators in 183 bureaus serving newspapers, other news agencies, and radio and television broadcasters in 157 countries.
In addition to its traditional news-agency business, over its network Reuters provides financial information and a wide array of electronic trading and brokering services to banks, brokering houses, companies, governments, and individuals worldwide.
http://www.reuters.com
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Neural network
A bottom-up artificial intelligence approach, a neural network is a network of many very simple processors ("units" or "neurons"), each possibly having a (small amount of) local memory. The units are connected by unidirectional communication channels ("connections"), which carry numeric data. The units operate only on their local data and on the inputs they receive via the connections. A neural network is a processing device, either an algorithm, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by the design and functioning of animal brains and components thereof. Most neural networks have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of presented patterns. In other words, neural networks "learn" from examples and exhibit some structural capability for generalization.
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