Copyright Clearance Center Releases New Report on Copyright in the Digital Workspace
Interesting report surveying internet use in the corporate space. According to the results, the internet is widely use for research (and is often the sole source of research). More surprisingly, file sharing is widespread in the corproate environment. "Employees seek out information that is relevant to business objectives. Once they find it, they frequently share it with others for a wide range of purposes often without realizing that their actions may violate copyright law." It's a habit as old as work - once you find something interesting, you share it with your friends and colleagues. More...

Copyright, Fair Use and the Public Interest
This opinion column by Neil Turkewitz, Executive Vice President of Recording Industry Association of America, expresses the view that protetcion of copyright is in the public interest. "We base our entire system of protection on the public's interest in promoting the creation and distribution of creative materials," he writes. More...

Copyscape
So today's Google Alert came with a big notice about this service, which scans the web to see who, as it says, has plagiarized your work. So I tried it out and the results were as expected: the service takes no notice of my Creative Commons license, and does not even differentiate between legitimate quotations - such as this hit on Jeremy Hiebert's site, which is flagged as plagiarism. More...

College Board Wants SAT Statistics Taken Off Web Site
Fair use or copyright violation? A group critical of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has posted results showing that minority and poor applicants scored lower than white and upper-class kids. The College Board, which owns the SAT, is demanding that the information be removed from the FairTest website, arguing that it violates copyright. More...

25% of Internet Sites Violate Copyrights of News Articles
I have serious doubts about the accuracy of this item, but let's suppose, for a moment, that it's true, that the survey was fairly and accurately conducted and that the results are reflective of the population as a whole. It says, then, that a quarter of all websites violate copyright. If this is true, then what we have here is far more than a mere policing problem. More...

A Blueprint for Better Copyright Law
Criticism of a recent initiative by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) that would have ISPs terminate Canadian internet accounts where users are suspected of file sharing activities. Not only is the proposal bereft of anything like due process, as the author points out the American experience shows that numerous mistakes in take-down orders are common and that innocent third parties would be impacted. More...

Copyright Issues in Digital Media
For people familiar with the copyright debate this essay won't introduce a lot that is new, but is worth a read nonetheless in order to view the issues from the point of view of economic efficiency, the only consideration countenanced by the authors. More...