I I D Communicationes

Emphasis for the second conference on the history of information science systems was on scientific and technical information systems in the period from the Second World War up through the early 1990s. These proceedings present the papers of historians of science and technology, information scientists, and scientists in other fields on a wide range of topics: informatics in chemistry; biology and medicine; information developments in multinational, industrial, and military settings; biographical studies of pioneering individuals; and the transformation of information systems and formats in the twentieth century.

Copyright is under siege. From file sharing to vast library scanning projects, new technologies, actors, and attitudes toward intellectual property threaten the value of creative work. However, while digital media and the Internet have made making and sharing perfect copies of original works almost effortless, debates about protecting authors' rights are nothing new. In this sweeping account of the evolution of copyright law since the mid-nineteenth century, Monika Dommann explores how radical media changes—from sheet music and phonographs to photocopiers and networked information systems—have challenged and transformed legal and cultural concept of authors' rights. Dommann provides a critical transatlantic perspective on developments in copyright law and mechanical reproduction of words and music, charting how artists, media companies, and lawmakers in the United States and western Europe approached the complex tangle of technological innovation, intellectual property, and consumer interests. From the seemingly innocuous music box, invented around 1800, to BASF's magnetic tapes and Xerox machines, she demonstrates how copyright has been continuously destabilized by emerging technologies, requiring new legal norms to regulate commercial and private copying practices. Without minimizing digital media's radical disruption to notions of intellectual property, Dommann uncovers the deep historical roots of the conflict between copyright and media—a story that can inform present-day debates over the legal protection of authorship.

Our most basic relationship with the world is one of technological mediation. Nowadays our available tools are digital, and increasingly what counts in economic, social, and cultural life is what can be digitally stored, distributed, replayed, augmented, and switched. Yet the digital remainsvery much materially configured, and though it now permeates nearly all human life it has not eclipsed all older technologies.This Handbook is grounded in an understanding that our technologically mediated condition is a condition of organization. It maps and theorizes the largely unchartered territory of media, technology, and organization studies. Written by scholars of organization and theorists of media and technology,the chapters focus on specific, and specifically mediating, objects that shape the practices, processes, and effects of organization.It is in this spirit that each chapter focuses on a specific technological object, such as the Battery, Clock, High Heels, Container, or Smartphone, asking the question, how does this object or process organize? In staying with the object the chapters remain committed to the everyday, empiricalworld, rather than being confined to established disciplinary concerns and theoretical developments.As the first sustained and systematic interrogation of the relation between technologies, media, and organization, this Handbook consolidates, deepens, and further develops the empirics and concepts required to make sense of the material forces of organization.