Plagiarism either makes you a bad person, or bad people are plagiarists, or both.  Either way, it’s obviously a moral crime, not an ethical economic one.  This morning brings yet another example of someone made to do penance:
Nick Simmons, the son of the rock star Gene Simmons, sought to make a name for himself in [...]

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I was introduced today to Google’s Election and Issue Advocacy Team, a service designed to maximize the effectiveness of political advertising campaigns. Scott Brown’s successful Senate campaign made use of this service and paid Google’s AdWords program to ensure that Brown’s web page was the first sponsored link for any search on “Martha Coakley.”
According [...]

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A booted traveler got revenge of a sort on Southwest Airlines:
On Feb. 13, a stout 39-year-old man was escorted off an Oakland-to-Burbank Southwest Air flight on the grounds that his size presented a “safety risk.” Unfortunately for Southwest, it messed with “the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater.”
The man was Kevin Smith, who, in addition to being [...]

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A while back I blogged about the stated preferences of Stephenie Meyer (author of the Twilight series of books) with respect to online uses of her unpublished manuscripts.  While trolling various authors’ official websites, I found another interesting comment by a vampire book writer about unauthorized uses of her work, this time with direct reference [...]

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While broadening my literary horizons, but still remaining firmly in the pre-teen science fantasy camp, I’ve recently discovered a series of books by Cassandra Clare – the Moral Instruments trilogy (soon to be many more books than a trilogy).  She writes for pretty much the same audience as Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame so I [...]

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Many may know about the fight between Amazon and Macmillan publishing. Yes it is about e-books and pricing, and the death of an industry, the death of print, and heck throw in Death in Venice if you like. But the real move may have been to highlight something else Amazon is quite worried about: Google [...]

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I have to pay for every text, and Organizing for America won’t honor requests to knock it off. This is making Verizon rich but not very helpful to anybody else.
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The NY Times runs a story today entitled, “How to Train the Aging Brain.” As someone with an aging brain, I was intrigued. According to the story, neural connections in your brain — those things that receive, process and transmit information — weaken with disuse and age. Is there anything that can be done? The [...]

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From here:
Rush Limbaugh was hospitalized on Wednesday for “chest pains” in Hawaii, but the controversial radio host (who also had a syndicated TV show at one point) is not dead contrary to a post made by Wikipedia early Thursday morning. The commentator’s page was edited briefly to say that December 30, 2009 was the day [...]

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Further to posting on how everyday Web 2.0 citizens relate to copyright law (and continuing my case study on Twilight-related IP issues), I have come across another example of where the popular understanding of digital legal rights is imperfect.  However, in this case, it looks like the copyright law – or something like it – [...]

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I have noticed recently while playing around on YouTube and Google Video seeking exam question fodder that many fans of popular movies and TV shows who make mash-up videos of material from the shows post a notice at the beginning or end of their video saying “no copyright infringement intended”.  It strikes me that this [...]

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Wired magazine ran an interesting competition starting on August 13. Writer Evan Ratliff who had written about how people disappear tried to disappear from the world and everyone he knew while Wired encouraged and helped people try and find him. The winner would receive $5,000. Ratliff explained his motivation:
It’s one thing to report on the [...]

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Overview page here. Messages here. It will be interesting to see what (if any) important new information is disclosed.
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Today, I participated in a terrific symposium at the Denver University School of Law based on Danielle Citron’s work on Cyber Civil Rights.  Two aspects of this symposium are particularly noteworthy, outside of the extremely interesting substance and the great group of speakers collected together by Danielle and the editors of the Denver University Law [...]

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Given that the Twilight sequel, New Moon, opens this week, I just have to blog about something Twilight-related.  I’ve been writing lately about celebrity privacy rights, and the right of publicity – and considering the extent to which celebrities should be legally protected against paparazzi intrusions.  Of course, there are other ways for them to [...]

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