Legal Protection: European Union Within the EU's goal of establishing a European single market also intellectual property rights are of significance. Therefore the European Commission aims at the harmonization of the respective national laws of the EU member states and for a generally more effective protection of intellectual property on an international level. Over the years it has adopted a variety of Conventions and Directives concerned with different aspects of the protection of industrial property as well as copyright and neighboring rights. An overview of EU activities relating to intellectual property protection is available on the website of the European Commission (DG Internal Market): http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/intprop/index.htm

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1500 - 1700 A.D. 1588 Agostino Ramelli's reading wheel Agostino Ramelli designed a "reading wheel", which allowed browsing through a large number of documents without moving from one spot to another. The device presented a large number of books - a small library - laid open on lecterns on a kind of ferry-wheel. It allowed skipping chapters and browsing through pages by turning the wheel to bring lectern after lectern before the eyes. Ramelli's reading wheel thus linked ideas and texts and reminds of today's browsing software used to navigate the World Wide Web. 1597 The first newspaper is printed in Europe.

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Machine vision A branch of artificial intelligence and image processing concerned with the identification of graphic patterns or images that involves both cognition and abstraction. In such a system, a device linked to a computer scans, senses, and transforms images into digital patterns, which in turn are compared with patterns stored in the computer's memory. The computer processes the incoming patterns in rapid succession, isolating relevant features, filtering out unwanted signals, and adding to its memory new patterns that deviate beyond a specified threshold from the old and are thus perceived as new entities.

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Amazon.Com Amazon.Com was one of the first online bookstores. With thousands of books, CDs and videos ordered via the Internet every year, Amazon.Com probably is the most successful Internet bookstore.

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