The result of this informatisation is the creation of a virtual body which is the exterior of a man or woman's social existence. It plays the same role that the physical body, except located in virtual space (it has no real location). The virtual body holds a certain emancipatory potential. It allows us to go to places and to do things which in the physical world would be impossible. It does not have the weight of the physical body, and is less conditioned by physical laws. It therefore allows one to create an identity of one's own, with much less restrictions than would apply in the physical world.
But this new freedom has a price. In the shadow of virtualisation, the data body has emerged. The data body is a virtual body which is composed of the files connected to an individual. As the
The virtual character of the data body means that social regulation that applies to the real body is absent. While there are limits to the manipulation and exploitation of the real body (even if these limits are not respected everywhere), there is little regulation concerning the manipulation and exploitation of the data body, although the manipulation of the data body is much easier to perform than that of the real body. The seizure of the data body from outside the concerned individual is often undetected as it has become part of the basic structure of an informatised society. But data bodies serve as raw material for the "New Economy". Both business and governments claim access to data bodies. Power can be exercised, and democratic decision-taking procedures bypassed by seizing data bodies. This totalitarian potential of the data body makes the data body a deeply problematic phenomenon that calls for an understanding of data as social construction rather than as something representative of an objective reality. How data bodies are generated, what happens to them and who has control over them is therefore a highly relevant political question.
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The Net consists of thousands of thousands of governmental and private networks linked together. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way of ever gaining ultimate control of the Internet. Although each of these networks is operated and controlled by an organization, no single organization operates and controls the Net. Instead of a central authority governing the Net, several bodies assure the operability of the Net by developing and setting technical specifications for the Net and by the control of the technical key functions of the Net as the coordination of the domain name system and the allocation of IP numbers.
Originally, the Net was a research project funded and maintained by the US Government and developed in collaboration by scientists and engineers. As the standards developed for ensuring operability ensued from technical functionality, technical coordination gradually grew out of necessity and was restricted to a minimum and performed by volunteers.
Later, in the 1980s, those occupied with the development of technical specifications organized themselves under the umbrella of the Internet Society in virtual organizations as the Internet Engineering Task Force, which were neither officially established nor being based on other structures than mailing lists and commitment, but nonetheless still serve as task forces for the development of standards ensuring the interoperability on the Net.
Since the late 80s and the early 90s, with the enormous growth of the Net - which was promoted by the invention of
Since the year 2000, a new model for technical coordination has been emerging: Formerly performed by several bodies, technical coordination is transferred to a single non-governmental organization: the Internet Coordination of Assigned Numbers and Names.
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The Internet can be used in in different ways: for distributing and retrieving information, for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication, and for the access services. Accordingly, there are different services on offer. The most important of these are listed below.
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Pre-infringement
Contracts
Contracts are a pre-infringement control method, which very often is underestimated. Properly formed contracts enable copyright holders to restrict the use of their works in excess of the rights granted under copyright laws.
Copy Protection
This approach was standard in the 1980s, but rejected by consumers and relatively easy to break. Still copy protection, whereby the vendor limits the number of times a file can be copied, is used in certain situations.
Limited Functionality
This method allows copyright owners to provide a copy of the work, which is functionally limited. Software creators, for example, can distribute software that cannot print or save. A fully functional version has to be bought from the vendor.
Date Bombs
Here the intellectual property holder distributes a fully functional copy but locks off access at a pre-specified date or after a certain number of uses.
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~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard
1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia
parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "
4th century
487 the Spartans introduce the so called "
170
50-60
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Virtual Private Networks provide secured connections to a corporate site over a public network as the Internet. Data transmitted through secure connections are encrypted and therefore have to be encrypted before they can be read.
These networks are called virtual because connections are provided only when you connect to a corporate site; they do not rely on dedicated lines and support mobile use.
Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output that result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches: 1) industrial property (
Those encompass the industries that create copyrighted works as their primary product. These industries include the motion picture industry (television, theatrical, and home video), the recording industry (records, tapes and CDs), the music publishing industry, the book, journal and newspaper publishing industry, and the computer software industry (including data processing, business applications and interactive entertainment software on all platforms), legitimate theater, advertising, and the radio, television and cable broadcasting industries.