Highlights on the Way to a Global Commercial Media Oligopoly: 1990s -1994 Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion. 1995 Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion. The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion. In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library. 1996 Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations. Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group. Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios. 1997 Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States. Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source. Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group. Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge. 1998 Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations. 1999 AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.

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Extract of Disney’s Content Production and Distribution Holdings Although the traditional media companies first steps into the digital sphere were fairly clumsy, they have quickly learned from their mistakes and continued to enlarge their Internet presence. Time Warner now for instance operates about 130 Web-Sites (http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/pubarchive/websites.html). Anyhow the stronger online-engagement of the big media conglomerates by 1998 has led to the establishment of a new pattern: "More than three-quarters of the 31 most visited news and entertainment websites were affiliated with large media firms, and most of the rest were connected to outfits like AOL and Microsoft." (Broadcasting and Cable, 6/22/98). During the last years many of the smaller players in the field of digital media have been driven out of competition by the huge media conglomerates. This mainly is a result of the advantages that the commercial media giants have over their less powerful counterparts: As engagement in online activities mostly does not lead to quick profits, investors must be able to take losses, which only powerful companies are able to. Traditional media outlets usually have huge stocks of digital programming, which they can easily plug into the Internet at little extra cost. To generate audience, the big media conglomerates constantly promote their Websites and other digital media products on their traditional media holdings. As possessors of the hottest "brands" commercial media companies often get premier locations from browser software makers, Internet service providers, search engines and portals. Having the financial resources at their disposition the big media firms are aggressive investors in start-up Internet media companies. Commercial media companies have close and long ties to advertisers, which enables them to seize most of these revenues.

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Slobodan Milosevic Slobodan Milosevic (* 1941) is a Serbian political leader. As a young man S. Milosevic joined the Communist Party, in 1984 the banker became head of the local Communist Party of Belgrade, in 1987 head of the Serb CP. Since 1989 he has been president of Serbia (since 1997 president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). During his reign the Yugoslav Republic broke up, bringing about the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. In 1998 the Kosovo Crisis started.

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Moral rights Authors of copyrighted works (besides economic rights) enjoy moral rights on the basis of which they have the right to claim their authorship and require that their names be indicated on the copies of the work and in connection with other uses thereof. Moral rights are generally inalienable and remain with the creator even after he has transferred his economic rights, although the author may waive their exercise.

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