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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1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) The 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, which focused on taking steps to protect copyright "in the digital age" among other provisions 1) makes clear that computer programs are protected as literary works, 2) the contracting parties must protect databases that constitute intellectual creations, 3) affords authors with the new right of making their works "available to the public", 4) gives authors the exclusive right to authorize "any communication to the public of their works, by wire or wireless means ... in such a way that members of the public may access these works from a place and at a time individually chosen by them." and 5) requires the contracting states to protect anti-copying technology and copyright management information that is embedded in any work covered by the treaty. The WCT is available on: http://www.wipo.int/documents/en/diplconf/distrib/94dc.htm http://www.wipo.int/documents/en/diplconf/dis...

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