Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 194-209
Author(s):  
César Domínguez

This chapter offers a reminder that ‘authorship’ is far from an abstract interest for actual literary producers. It is what allows authors to file a legal claim to their works, which for them are not only ‘texts’, or examples of ‘discourse’ in the manner discussed by Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, but rather pieces of intellectual property. And intellectual goods—eminently portable, endlessly diverse, and difficult to reverse-engineer—were among the earliest to circulate widely throughout the world. They thus required legal protection on a global scale. Offering a revisionist history of the origins of transnational copyright regimes, this chapter thus draws attention to the role that authors—first and foremost that giant of nineteenth-century literature Victor Hugo—played in ensuring the protection of their names.

Author(s):  
Mauricio Onetto Pavez

The year 2020 marks the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of the Strait of Magellan. The unveiling of this passage between 1519 and 1522 allowed the planet to be circumnavigated for the first time in the history of humanity. All maritime routes could now be connected, and the idea of the Earth, in its geographical, cosmographic, and philosophical dimensions, gained its definitive meaning. This discovery can be considered one of the founding events of the modern world and of the process of globalization that still continues today. This new connectivity awoke an immediate interest in Europe that led to the emergence of a political consciousness of possession, domination, and territorial occupation generalized on a global scale, and the American continent was the starting point for this. This consciousness also inspired a desire for knowledge about this new form of inhabiting the world. Various fields of knowledge were redefined thanks to the new spaces and measurements produced by the discovery of the southern part of the Americas, which was recorded in books on cosmography, natural history, cartography, and manuscripts, circulating mainly between the Americas and Europe. All these processes transformed the Strait of Magellan into a geopolitical space coveted by Europeans during the 16th century. As an interoceanic connector, it was used to imagine commercial routes to the Orient and political projects that could sustain these dynamics. It was also conceived as a space to speculate on the potential wealth in the extreme south of the continent. In addition, on the Spanish side, some agents of the Crown considered it a strategic place for imperial projections and the defense of the Americas.


Antiquity ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (85) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Elaine Sanceau

It was from the Portuguese that Europe first learned something about India. Their 16th century literature abounds in information on the subject. Duarte Barboza, Tomé Pires, Castanheda, João de Barros, Gaspar Correa even, though he says that he will only write about the exploits of his countrymen, have each one given to the world many interesting facts regarding the ethnology, the customs and beliefs, and some account of the history of that baffling sub-continent which Portugal, of European nations, was the first to observe at close quarters.


2020 ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
Krystyna Kossakowska-Jarosz

This text is part of the author’s research on the literary culture of the nineteenth-century UpperSilesia. The author shows that at the forefront of modern Europe (at the beginning of industrializationand urbanization of the continent) the autochthon writers of Upper Silesia undertook actionsaimed at fostering cultural awareness amongst their compatriots, who were considered to belong toa national minority, in order to instil patriotic feelings in them. In the current post-colonial discoursetheir struggles are recognized as the “voice of the periphery”. Striving to achieve civic maturity intheir Polish ecumene, these writers demonstrated considerable knowledge of their own Polish rootsas the inhabitants of this region. They assumed they must be aware of their distinctness from thedominant society in the Prussian state. The messages conveyed to their compatriots consisted inemphasizing the common history of Silesians and Poles and remembering the glorious past of thelatter. These were the foundations for shaping the sense of identity as well as for creating strongties with their own land. The development of such an emotional attitude towards the place and itspast among the readers allowed for effective building of patriotic attitudes, which was confirmed bycontemporary observers of the writers’ efforts. They continued coming to Upper Silesia from otherregions of the former Polish Republic to learn about ways of writing “for people.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Pim de Zwart

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.


2007 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Świerczewska-Pietras

Entrepreneurship on the net makes the expansion possible in fields where in the real world very often it would be unworkable because of many obstacles and limiting factors like costs - which are quite simply to overcome on the net.  It is easy to set up a web site available to millions of people in the world who type the web site address or find what they are looking for in Google or via another search engine.  The Internet market is open to all ideas and hence we should take advantage thereof. The number of internet shops has increased by 100% against the numbers from last year. The number of buyers has increased as well. Thanks to the World Wide Web, e-mails and communicators, entrepreneurs have a chance to communicate with clients on a global scale. It was merely not so long ago in 1977, when Ken Olson, the president and founder of the Digital Equipment Corp. Company stated, “there is no reason as to why anyone should want to have a computer at home”. Today, most businesses, including most of us cannot imagine a life without a computer or the Internet that in the age of advanced technology has become a common work tool.  The work above presents the history of the Internet and the most important elements which have influenced its development and without which the virtual world would not have existed.  The thesis will present an in-depth look at the Internet’s range and capacity, possibilities it creates, and also challenges the safety features Internet consumers face. Additionally it will provide explanations of the most important definitions used in the world of e-business.


Author(s):  
L.Zh. Abzhaparova ◽  
◽  
L.N. Abdrazakova ◽  

This article describes that cosmopolitanism reflects the nature of capital, striving towards where the best conditions are created for it and it is possible to obtain the greatest benefit. In the history of industrially developed countries, a complex interaction of cosmopolitanism with the idea of a nation-state is traced. The elements of cosmopolitanism were also present in communist ideology. It is in the context of cosmopolitanism that his basic thesis of building a classless and stateless society on a global scale can be interpreted. In the USSR, where during the first decade of Soviet power the expectation of a world revolution was replaced by the predominance of political principles in politics, the concept of cosmopolitanism acquired a persistently negative meaning and was perceived as a bourgeois ideology. After World War II, the state periodically campaigned to combat "rootless cosmopolitanism" and adultery in the face of Western scientific and cultural achievements. Furthermore, we can point out that a different interpretation of cosmopolitanism has led to frictions of various kinds. In essence, it should have been one of the most important factors in solving world problems. In this research work, special attention is paid to the notion of cosmopolitanism in the context of the current situation in the world. An important problem is the place of the human being in the world as a matter of philosophy or the place of the human being in the system of state politics as a matter of political science.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document