We’ve all heard that print newspapers are dead, that people like me who like to spread a newspaper across a breakfast table are dinosaurs. News at your fingertips on the web is where it’s at, we hear, and circulation and web traffic data would seem to support that. To respond, newspapers have proven aggressive in [...]

One of the Copyright Alliance’s academic advisors, James Gibson of the University of Richmond, had a perceptive editorial in The Washington Post today on the recent deal between Google and the publishers over the Google Book search service. Here was our reaction on the morning of the announcement, and here is Professor Gibson’s analysis.
Bottom line [...]

My oh-so-clever use of question marks in that headline is meant to convey that I find the very “battle” to be both absurd and non-existent, not unlike the so-called “copyright vs. innovation” battle. In both cases the subjects go hand in hand, in fact are symbiotic. But rarely are they portrayed that way.
This particular rant [...]

How do you stop a viral spread of false information, for example the myth that Senator Barack Obama is a Muslim or that a tooth left in Coca-Cola will dissolve overnight? Well, the fact is, you don’t. That’s the problem with these myths, they’re like Jason from “Halloween” – they won’t die.
That brings me [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY — Ideas, fortunately, cannot be copyrighted. Ideas, however, are very important in the debate over copyright. Stanford University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig knows that, and is back with yet another book urging the reduction of rights of creators. This self-appointed pied piper of copyright dilution has given us a preview of his new [...]

MUNCIE, INDIANA: The folks here at Ball State’s Digital Economy Institute have put on an interesting conference called “Digital Policy in the Information Age.” I’ve already blogged on an interesting exchange I had regarding DVD replication with a student who attended the panel discussion in which I participated.
What was my panel on? That’s kind of [...]

About two years ago I was on a panel where a speaker said he had just come back from Silicon Valley, and every investor he met said they wanted to get in with any start-up that had a way to get creative works to people more easily, the law be dammed. Asked why they weren’t [...]

There’s a lot of information circulating on fair use in our society, some of it more reliable than others. Here at the Copyright Alliance, we believe fair use is an important safety valve allowing new creators and educators to make modest use of copyrighted works, but we also recognize that fair use has important limitations.
We’ve [...]

I’ve written before about my fears that Google searches, RSS feeds and other tools that, wonderfully, bring us more information than ever before ALSO enable theft of expression like never before.
In the “analog” era, plagiarism was hard work. You had to hand-write or type the prose in front of you, a tedious exercise that generally [...]

Well, we’ve been down this road before.
What is fair use? According to the American University Center for Social Media, fair use can be defined as follows:
Fair use is the right, in some circumstances, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it.
Okay, we’re already off on the wrong foot. Most of that [...]