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A very thought provoking article backed with a very good case study. Excellent work!

So basically, never copy anything, because copyright laws appear to be extremely subjective.

I'm not sure how you could write a post concerning copyright on the WEB and not mention Creative Commons. This is the standard means by which bloggers, podcasters, and other Web 2.0-niks protect their copyright and still allow others to use the material by attributing the author. In that spirit, I now copyright this comment as follows:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

An excellent article. Thanks for the overview.

I have some specific questions about mashups, feeds and screen scraping. I'd very much like to have your insights.

'Mashup' is one of the hot buzzwords in the tech world today. A mashup conmbines visual, data and process content from multiple sources into a unified end-user experience. To create mashups, mashers use published APIs from the likes of Yahoo!, Amazon and Google. This isn't a problem because these APIs come with licenses that allow their use in mashups.

However, some mashups also pull data from RSS feeds and by scraping content directly from web pages. This content does not come with licenses that allow fair use. I've written about this problem in my blog.

Now there are a growing number of vendors such as Intel, Kapow and Dapper that not only allow users to scrape content, but provide a public forum where this content can be shared with others.

The mashers who scrape protected content are possibly in the wrong. But, what about the vendors who provide free-of-charge tools to enable mashers to take and publish protected content? Are they likely in the line of fire?

Thanks again for the excellent article.

Regards,

Kelly A. Shaw, Ph.D.
Analyst
Serena Software

Good article, but does any of it apply outside of the U.S.?

it looks like America has to many lawyers and not enough workers we will see the consequences in a foreseeable future, which already started.

A thought provoking and welcome article, indeed. While it seems that common sense and honesty will guide us reasonably well, I personally would probably benefit from further study of the topic. This is because of my dual role of "part time academic" - "part time for profit" research.

A major shortcoming of the article was that it was 100% U.S.A. centric. A sizeable fraction of the readers are based elsewhere, and test cases in U.S. courts (while followed closely by the interested parties everywhere) may have little relevance for many of us. This is even more so, because copyright violators in WWW cross national borders easily.

Can someone stretch his/her imagination and tell shat will happen if there are no copyright and all information is allowed to be copied freely.

I suppose the only people who suffer will be the lawyers. The society as a whole will gain because knowledge can be shared quickly, without any price. A copyright is nothing but an artifical scarcity created so that the insecure fellow who created it can benefit by hoarding. And who pays compensation to Newton, Pythagores, or Einstein for their knowledge and ideas? They would not have become great had they restricted the spread of their knowledge artificially. Nor we would have benefited and reached this stage of technological advancement.

Let us work at striking down the regime of creating knowledge scarcity. What are we? Just a pebble in the vast when the mighty ocean knowledge remains unexplored?

Perhaps I can ask a question: in many foodie blogs ther are recipes taken from books and magazines, but re-made by the blogger (often with original pictures). Is this legal? There's some sort of credit you must give to the author (a fair practice everytime, in my opinion!) and that credit is enough for law? Yhank you very much in advance (and by the way I apologize for my poor english)

Note - fair re-use law doesn't apply in the UK (where some IEEE members reside).
indeed, a lot of the relevant law cited here doesn't apply in Europe directly (e.g. there's no "constitutional" right to free speech - it varies.

otherwise, useful stuff

"The copyright law was eventually changed to address that unfair situation". That the situation was "unfair" is nothing but a subjective judgment. Are journalists no longer expected to be objective?