"A man is crazy who writes a secrete
in any other way than one which
will conceal it from the vulgar."
Roger Bacon (~1250 AD)
The essence of human communication is not only the social behavior to give or get messages (of whatever meaning) but also how to give and get them, and to include certain people by excluding others from the process of informing.
e.g. whispering is an effective way of talking to exclude the majority.
What about ways of writing?
Already some of the first written messages in human history obviously found special forms of hiding contents from the so-called others. When the knowledge of writing meant a privilege in a stronger sense as it is true today (in China for a long period writing was forbidden to people not working for the government), the alphabet itself was a kind of cryptography (that is why Catholic churches were painted with pictures explaining the stories of the Bible).
Certainly the methods of deciphering and enciphering improved a lot during the last 4.000 years. In the meantime cryptography has become a topic without end and with less technological limits every day. On the one hand there is the field of biometrics, which is highly related to cryptography but still in its beginnings, on the other hand there emerge so-called infowars, which intend to substitute or at least accompany war and are unthinkable without cryptography.
But there is much more to detect, like the different forms of de- and encoding. And very important, too, there is the history of cryptography that tells us about the basics to make it easier to understand today's issues.
In the actual age of (dis-)information storing and transporting electronic information safely increases its importance. Governments, institutions, economy and individuals rely on the hope that no-one can read or falsify their messages/data as it is much more difficult to detect and proof abuses in electronic media than in elder forms of written communication.
TEXTBLOCK 1/1 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611776/100438658802
The 1996
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.
ISPs (Internet Service Provider), BBSs (Bulletin Board Service Operators), systems operators and other service providers (in the U.S.) can usually be hold liable for infringing activities that take place through their facilities under three theories: 1) direct liability: to establish direct infringement liability there must be some kind of a direct volitional act, 2) contributory liability: a party may be liable for contributory infringement where "... with knowledge of the infringing activity, [it] induces, causes or materially contributes to the infringing activity of another." Therefore a person must know or have reason to know that the subject matter is copyrighted and that particular uses violated copyright law. There must be a direct infringement of which the contributory infringer has knowledge, and encourages or facilitates for contributory infringement to attach, and 3) vicarious liability: a party may be vicariously liable for the infringing acts of another if it a) has the right and ability to control the infringer's acts and b) receives a direct financial benefit from the infringement. Unlike contributory infringement, knowledge is not an element of vicarious liability.
The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was signed into law by U.S. President Clinton in 1998 and implements the two 1996