Copyright Criminals, which airs its documentaries on PBS, has an upcoming show on the rise of sampling in hip-hop music. While, the documentary focuses on copyright laws covering music it's not too difficult to apply lessons learned for other content including text found on web sites.

You may notice that I currently don't specify a copyright or Creative Commons license on my site. Where do I stand on the issue? I pretty much follow US Copyright laws which basically says using excerpts from an article is proper but it's illegal, outside of personal use, to copy a full article without permission. In the end though, it's not the law that I rely on but each persons own moral compass. That seems to work for me. It's only in rare cases that I've found people stealing entire articles without permission nor giving credit where credit is due.

Copyright Criminals - Trailer from IndiePix on Vimeo.

Story found via Creative Commons

A Belgian court on Tuesday ordered the search giant to refrain from showing excerpts of articles from French- and German-language Belgian newspapers on Google News and Google's Web search site for Belgium, reaffirming an earlier ruling by the same court against the company. However, in a nod to Google, the court reduced the daily fine Google faces if it fails to heed the order, from $1.3 million to $32,500.

"In an attempt to help bloggers track down content theft and copyright violations, MaxPower.ca has created the Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin for full version WordPress blogs. The plugin injects a “digital fingerprint” manually into your posts which is seen only in your feeds, not in the post itself."

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"Tobias Schlitt "freaked out" today about PHP Freak's republishing of his blog feed. He publicly withdraws his implicit permission for PHP Freaks to republish content from his feeds. This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues. In my mind, there's no question that a blogger grants an implied..."

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