Conservative Think Tanks and the Media Given the growing political importance of media most think tanks - especially conservative ones in the U.S. - have clearly stated the need for strong marketing and communications. The former president of the American Enterprise Institute, William Baroody puts it that way "We pay as much attention to the dissemination of the product as we do to the content. ... We hire ghost writers for scholars to produce op-ed articles that are sent to the one hundred and one co-operating newspapers three pieces every two weeks ... The real test is getting your message out. ... Market your policy recommendations, market the principles and values behind them, market the tangible publications and events your organization is producing. Market the think tank concept itself. Then market your specific organization." Relations with the media form one of the most important element within the think tanks marketing strategies. The Hoover Institution's public affairs office, for example, links to 900 media centers across the U.S. and 450 abroad. The Reason Foundation, a strong fighter for privatization, had 359 television and radio appearances in 1995 and more than 1,500 citations in national newspapers and magazines. Furthermore the Manhattan Institute has held more than 600 forums on briefings for journalists and policy makers on a broad range of public policy issues. Not to leave the distribution of their respective ideologies to chance, conservative institutions have created a variety of conservative-controlled media outlets and projects, as well as television and radio broadcasting networks. The Free Congress Foundation for instance, in addition to its National Empowerment Television, publishes NetNewsNow, a broadcast fax letter sent to more than 400 U.S. radio producers. Conservative foundations also spent US$ 2,734,263 on four right-of -center magazines between 1990 and 1993, providing publishing opportunities for conservative thinkers and policy advocates.

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Databody economy and the surveillance state Databody economy Surveillance state Promise Reality Promise Reality universal prosperity universal commercialisation total security total control frictionless market pacified society political harmony death of democracy The glamour of the data body economy clouds economic practices which are much less than glamorous. Through the seizure of the data body, practices that in the real political arena were common in the feudal age and in the early industrial age are being reconstructed. The data body economy digitally reconstructs exploitative practices such as slavery and wage labour. However, culturally the data body is still a very new phenomenon: mostly, people think if it does not hurt, it cannot be my body. Exploitation of data bodies is painless and fast. Nevertheless, this can be expected to change once the awareness of the political nature of the data body becomes more widespread. As more and more people routinely move in digitised environments, it is to be expected that more critical questions will be asked and claims to autonomy, at present restricted to some artistic and civil society groups trying to get heard amidst the deafening noise of the commercial ICT propaganda, will be articulated on a more general level. The more problematic aspect of this development may be something else: the practices of the data body economy, themselves a reconstruction of old techniques of seizure, have begun to re-colonise real political space. Simon Davis, Director of the London-based privacy campaigners Privacy International, one of the foremost critics of modern-day technologies of surveillance and data capturing, has warned against the dangers of a loss of autonomy and undermining of civic rights that are being generated when workplaces are clogged with digital equipment allowing the constant monitoring and surveillance of workers. Unless current trends towards data capturing remain unchecked, the workplace of the future will have many features of the sinister Victorian workhouses that appear Charles Dickens novels, where any claims for autonomy were silenced with references to economic efficiency, and the required discipline imposed by a hierarchy of punishments. The constant adaptation process required from the modern individual has anonymised and structuralized punishment, which now appears in the guise of error messages and the privatisation of risk.

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Invention According to the WIPO an invention is a "... novel idea which permits in practice the solution of a specific problem in the field of technology." Concerning its protection by law the idea "... must be new in the sense that is has not already been published or publicly used; it must be non-obvious in the sense that it would not have occurred to any specialist in the particular industrial field, had such a specialist been asked to find a solution to the particular problem; and it must be capable of industrial application in the sense that it can be industrially manufactured or used." Protection can be obtained through a patent (granted by a government office) and typically is limited to 20 years.

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