Copyright Management and Control Systems: Pre-Infringement

Pre-infringement copyright management and control systems that inhibit or control infringement of intellectual property may be put into place by copyright owners before distributing their works. Examples are:

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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Think Tanks and Corporate Money

Looking at the financial situation of think tanks, different funding patterns can be found. While financial contributions from foundations play an important role especially for conservative think tanks, also contributions from governments are made to certain institutions. Yet one of the most important funding sources are corporate donors and individual contributors. Although the extent to which - in most cases conservative - think tanks rely on corporate funding varies, from the US$ 158 million spent by the top 20 conservative think tanks, more than half of it was contributed by corporations or businessmen.

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Internet services

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.

Telnet

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Electronic Messaging (E-Mail)

World Wide Web (WWW)

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Multiple User Dimensions (MUDs)

Gopher

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R.J. Reynolds

American manufacturer of tobacco products. The origins of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company date to the post-Civil War era, when Richard Joshua Reynolds (1850-1918) began trading in tobacco, first in his native Virginia and then in Winston, N.C., where in 1875 he established his first plug factory. The company began to diversify in the 1960s, acquiring chiefly food and oil concerns, and the tobacco concern became a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., in 1970.

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WIPO

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.

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Eli Lilly & Company

Eli Lilly & Company discovers, develops, manufactures, and sells pharmaceutical and animal health care products. Research efforts are directed primarily towards discovering and developing products to diagnose and treat diseases in human beings and animals and to increase the efficiency of animal food production. Pharmaceutical products comprise neuroscience products, endocrine products and anti-invectives. Products are manufactured and distributed through owned or leased facilities in the United States, Puerto Rico, and 27 other countries and sold in approximately 160 countries.

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Chevron

Chevron is a U.S. petroleum corporation formed in 1926 with the merger of Standard Oil Company of California and Pacific Oil Company. Headquartered in San Francisco, it operates today in more than 90 countries, either directly or through affiliates.

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VISA

Visa International's over 21,000 member financial institutions have made VISA one of the world's leading full-service payment network. Visa's products and services include Visa Classic card, Visa Gold card, Visa debit cards, Visa commercial cards and the Visa Global ATM Network. VISA operates in 300 countries and territories and also provides a large consumer payments processing system.

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Merck & Co., Inc.

Merck & Co. is a research-driven pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of human and animal health products, and provides pharmaceutical benefit services through Merck-Medco Managed Care LLC. The Company is comprised of two operating segments. Merck-Medco primarily includes sale of non-Merck products and Merck-Medco pharmaceutical benefit services, principally manages prescription drug programs and programs to help manage patient health. Merck-Medco sells its services to corporations, labor unions and insurance companies. Merck Pharmaceuticals consists of therapeutic and preventive agents, generally sold by prescription, for the treatment of human disorders. The Company's human health products are sold to drug wholesalers and retailers, hospitals, clinics, government agencies, and managed care providers.

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World Bank

The World Bank as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) originated during World War II in preparation for postwar international financial and economic cooperation. Initiated by the United States and Great Britain. The principal functions of the World Bank are to assist in the reconstruction and development of its member countries by facilitating capital investment for productive purposes, to promote private foreign investment by guarantees of and participation in loans and other investments made by private investors, and to make loans for productive purposes out of its own resources or funds borrowed by it when private capital is not available on reasonable terms.

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Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.

American financial-services holding company whose principal subsidiary, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc., is the largest retail brokerage house in the United States. Headquarters are in New York City. In the 1970s, under Chairman Donald T. Regan (later treasury secretary under President Ronald Reagan), the firm moved aggressively into such other financial services as insurance and established the nation's largest money-market mutual fund. The holding company was created in 1973. Under Merrill Lynch International, it has several international operations, including Smith New Court PLC, a British securities firm acquired in 1995.

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Expert system

Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to artificial intelligence. The three main elements of expert systems are: (1) an interface which allows interaction between the system and the user, (2) a database (also called the knowledge base) which consists of axioms and rules, and (3) the inference engine, a computer program that executes the inference-making process. The disadvantage of rule-based expert systems is that they cannot handle unanticipated events, as every condition that may be encountered must be described by a rule. They also remain limited to narrow problem domains such as troubleshooting malfunctioning equipment or medical image interpretation, but still have the advantage of being much lower in costs compared with paying an expert or a team of specialists.

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Nero

Nero's full name was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37-68 AD). Nero was Roman Emperor from 54-68 AD; during the first years in power he stood under the influence of his teacher Seneca. In this period he was very successful in inner politics and abroad, for example in Britannia. Soon he changed into a selfish dictator, had his brother, mother and wife killed and probably burnt Rome, blaming the Christians for it. More than in political affairs he was interested in arts. when he was dismissed in 68, he committed suicide.

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