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Commercial Content |
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Commercial media aim towards economies of scale and scope and the satisfaction of their shareholders. As most of the private media companies' revenues come from advertising, much of their content is designed to allure audiences, whose size and composition is decisive for advertisers and marketers. Those revenues being of vital importance for commercial media firms, their programming in many cases is tailored to the needs of the advertising industry. In their self-interest commercial media also often accept pressure from marketers and advertisers. "... for example,  Procter & Gamble, the world's number one corporate advertiser, explicitly prohibits programming "which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking all sentiment or spiritual motivation." (Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney)
Hence, so as not to interfere with the commercial message, most media conglomerates concentrate on easy-to-consume programming with entertainment, music and sports forming most of their content. Although they also offer news and documentaries, programs focusing on topics of public interest or minority issues hardly play more than a supporting role as they do not comply with the demands of a profit oriented system. One of the most serious effects of this development is that citizens are substantially deprived of an essential element for their participation in the public sphere: objective, exhaustive and diverse information on issues of public concern.
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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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