Traditional copyright and the practice of paying
Yet again new technologies have altered the way of how (copyrighted) works are produced, copied, made obtainable and distributed. The emergence of global electronic networks and the increased availability of digitalized intellectual property confront existing copyright with a variety of questions and challenges. Although the combination of several types of works within one larger work or on one data carrier, and the digital format (although this may be a recent development it has been the object of detailed legal scrutiny), as well as networking (telephone and cable networks have been in use for a long time, although they do not permit interactivity) are nothing really new, the circumstance that recent technologies allow the presentation and storage of text, sound and visual information in digital form indeed is a novel fact. Like that the entire information can be generated, altered and used by and on one and the same device, irrespective of whether it is provided online or offline.
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1455
Gutenberg's printing press was an innovative aggregation of inventions known for centuries before Gutenberg: the olive oil press, oil-based ink, block-print technology, and movable types allowed the mass production of the movable type used to reproduce a page of text and enormously increased the production rate. During the Middle Ages it took monks at least a year to make a handwritten copy of a book. Gutenberg could print about 300 sheets per day. Because parchment was too costly for mass production - for the production of one copy of a medieval book often a whole flock of sheep was used - it was substituted by cheap paper made from recycled clothing of the massive number of deads caused by the Great Plague.
Within forty-five years, in 1500, ten million copies were available for a few hundred thousand literate people. Because individuals could examine a range of opinions now, the printed Bible - especially after having been translated into German by Martin Luther - and increasing literacy added to the subversion of clerical authorities. The interest in books grew with the rise of vernacular, non-Latin literary texts, beginning with Dante's Divine Comedy, the first literary text written in Italian.
Among others the improvement of the distribution and production of books as well as increased literacy made the development of print mass media possible.
Michael Giesecke (Sinnenwandel Sprachwandel Kulturwandel. Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Informationsgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) has shown that due to a division of labor among authors, printers and typesetters Gutenberg's invention increasingly led to a standardization of - written and unwritten - language in form of orthography, grammar and signs. To communicate one's ideas became linked to the use of a code, and reading became a kind of rite of passage, an important step towards independency in a human's life.
With the growing linkage of knowledge to reading and learning, the history of knowledge becomes the history of reading, of reading dependent on chance and circumstance.
For further details see:
Martin Warnke, Text und Technik,
Bruce Jones, Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: The Printing Press and a Changing World,
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Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and headquartered in Redmond, USA, Microsoft Corporation is today's world-leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. As MS-DOS, the first operating system released by Microsoft, before, Windows, its successor, has become the de-facto standard operating system for personal computer. According to critics and following a recent court ruling this is due to unfair competition.
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: