As cell phone cameras and palm-sized videocams have become cheap and ubiquitous, there is little if anything that is immune from being documented and displayed on the web, as numerous celebrities and sports stars have learned to their regret. In the realm of hard news, the result is that citizen jou...

I’ve declared this the Year of Original Content and I’m inviting you to help join the fight against those who abuse our content. Scam, spam, splog, and scraper blogs are big business, taking in $3.2 billion dollars in 2007 just in the United States. Russia, China, Zimbabwe, and other cou...

When prices are artificially inflated beyond the market price for a product a black market is created to meet the actual Demand for a product at the price that is right for consumers. When tickets for a sporting event are too high they have extra that are sold outside the stadium below ticket price....

As I mentioned yesterday, it has come en vogue for programmers to create simple plagiarism checkers that feed queries to Google or another search engine. The other tool commonly created is non-repudiation service, such as Numly, MyFreeCopyright, etc. that register works in their database to provide ...

Update x2: This article has been updated, see the information below. Hammerfall is a well-known role-playing game for Facebook. The application has nearly a quarter of a million monthly users and is rated (currently) at a 4.5. However, the game and its creators, Dennis and Mark Kimbell, have found t...

photo credit: big swift Yesterday, we took a look at five “stupid” copyright questions and why they weren’t stupid at all. As was illustrated in the post, copyright law, in places, is a hopeless kludge and even the most basic questions can have very complicated answers. Though this...

Over the past few days, I have received comments from an individual claiming to use Copygator, a new service (the domain was registered on Jan. 11) that claims to “monitor your RSS feed and find where your content has been republished in the blogosphere.” The idea behind Copygator is tha...

(You can download higher-quality versions of the above trailer here.) I’ve been a fan of Nina Paley’s comic strips for years, but I didn’t know she’s also an animator. Josh Jasper recently gave me a head’s-up about her full-length, unreleased film, “Sita Sings The...

photo credit: joelogon Plagiarists are not typically known for being the brightest nor the hardest-working people on the planet. If they were, they wouldn’t be plagiarizing. But for every reasonably intelligent person that makes a mistake and gets caught up in a plagiarism tiff, there are doze...

photo credit: ladybugbkt Every year, at about this time, I take a look back at the year that was and, specifically, my predictions that I had made for it going into the new year. It’s always fun, and sometimes a bit comical, to look back on year, see where we thought we would be now and compar...