The Electronic Frontier Foundation is petitioning a federal judge to protect the anonymity of individuals involved in a copyright lawsuit over porn downloading.

An adult film company wants to determine the identities of 1495 Internet users. The judge ordered the individuals suing to protect their anonymity to reveal their identities before the suit could proceed. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, January 30, 2012.

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The U.S. Supreme Court extended copyright protection to foreign works created from 1023 to 1989 and already in the public domain thereby shutting down creative uses of these works to protect profits of the owners of old works.

The overall result, argues Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center, is a loss of free speech. -db

In a commentary from the First Amendment Center, January 20, 2012, by Ken Paulson.

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In a criminal copyright case, the Justice Department shut down Megaupload, executed search warrants , arrested some executives and seized $50 worth of assets.

The Justice Department claimed that Megaupload violated copyrights of movies, “often before their theatrical release, music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale.” -db

From Wired, January 19, 2012, by David Kravets.

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In a victory for the technology industry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid postponed a vote on the Protect IP Act, the online piracy bill before the Senate.

In effect, Congress is going back to the drawing board to balance intellectual property rights with openness and innovation on the Internet. -db

From Wired, January 20, 2012, by David Kravets.

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In retaliation for being sued by a major karaoke distributor in California federal court for disrupting the karaoke marketplace, Sony/ATV went to Nashville to sue KTS Karaoke for copyright infringement.

Sony/ATV wants greater compensation in a complicated system of multiple rights and forms of payments but is now suing for damages, an injunction and a recall of all karaoke CDs so they may be destroyed. -db

From the Hollywood Reporter, January 20, 2012,  by Eriq Gardner.

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Rejecting arguments that a 1994 law complying with an international treaty violated U.S. copyright law and free speech rights, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-2 to extend copyright protection to foreign works.

Google was among those against the law, but the government said that foreign works should receive the same treatment as domestic works under the reciprocal international copyright system. -db

From Reuters, January 18, 2012.

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The Citizen Media Law Project is providing access to information on the SOPA and PIPA, the online piracy bills before Congress, and also to links for summaries and commentaries on the laws. -db

From the Citizen Media Law Project,  January 18, 2012, by CMLP Staff.

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The blackout of websites, including BoingBoing, Reddit and Wikipedia, to protest the online piracy laws before Congress was successful in igniting opposition against the laws writes Ian Paul in PCWorld.

Paul says that there were 2.4 million tweets on the topic during the first 16 hours on Wednesday and that the Los Angeles Times reported that 4.5 million signed Google’s petition against the laws. -db

From a commentary in PCWorld, January 18, 2012, by Ian Paul.

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With copyright protection established in the U.S. Constitution and free speech in the Bill of Rights, it is vital to honor each in the fight over the new online piracy bills currently before Congress says Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center.

It will be a difficult task to craft a law that intercepts pirated content headed for the U.S. while protecting the free flow of ideas. -db

From the First Amendment Center, January 13, 2012, by Ken Paulson.

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Formed by 29 media companies, NewRight plans to act as a clearing house for content produced by major journalism ventures including the Associated Press, Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company.

NewsRight wants to sign up aggregators to see if they are willing to pay for news. -db

From a commentary for the Citizens Media Law Project, January 17, 2012 by Victoria S. Ekstrand.

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It now appears now that Congressional bills to protect copyright on the Internet will be embroiled in a long, intense struggle even as President Barack Obama declared his opposition to key elements of the bills.

The technology industry opposes the bills out of concern that they will stifle free speech and innovation. -db

From The New York Times, January 15, 2012, by Jenna Wortham and Somini Sengupta with contribution from Nick Bilton.

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The Nevada State Bar is investigating Righthaven’s chief executive and two lawyers who  worked for the company. Righthaven was founded to sue blogs and websites for re-posting newspaper articles without permission.

The company initially collected several thousand dollars by threatening to sue but slumped after failing to prevail in any of the cases contested in court. -db

From Wired, January 13, 2012, by David Kravets.

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Twenty-nine news companies are forming NewsRight, a for-profit enterprise, to protect copyrighted content and to seek fees in cases of unauthorized use of content.

NewsRight intends to avoid the errors of Righthaven, the so-called copyright troll, who suffered devastating defeats in the courts caused by its shoddy practices. -db

From MediaPost, January 5, 2012, by Erik Sass.

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The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that  court documents in case brought by Apple against a maker of Mac computer clones were public.

Apple claimed that the documents contained “compelling trade secrets”  about the Mac OS X operating system. -db

From The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, January 6, 2012, by Kristen Rasmussen.

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A federal judge ruled that Photobucket.com, Kodab’s photo-sharing website, does not have to examine some 9 billion images for possible copyright infringement. -db

From the Courthouse News Service, January 5, 2012, by Adam Klasfeld.

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The Electronic Freedom Foundation takes on what it says are distortions of the positions taken by those opposing the online piracy legislation recently introduced in both houses of Congress.

While acknowledging that the tech industry recognizes the importance of copyright as it applies to the Internet, writes Trevor Timm for EFF, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already allows copyright holders to direct websites to remove copyrighted content. The new legislation overreaches, says Timm, adversely affecting millions of non-infringing users. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, December 13, 2011 , by Trevor Timm.

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Congressional critics of the entertainment industry-backed online piracy law have introduced a bill that would change existing trade laws to reflect that illegally downloading copyright content from foreign-owned web sites would constitute foreign imports. That would allow the International Trade Commission the power to decide if the imports violated intellectual property rights.

The critics say this approach would avoid the problems of the proposed online piracy acts which give the government and industry too much power to take down sites. -db

From Broadcasting & Cable, December 2, 2011, by John Eggerton.

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An executive with the Motion Picture Association said that he expects there to be changes in the Stop Online Piracy Act and its senate version in the wake of the clash between the entertainment and technology industries.

The executive indicated that the entertainment  industry wanted to address some of the legitimate concerns of the technology industry. -db

From The New York Times, November 30, 2011, by Michael Cieply.

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Righthaven’s methods in pursuing copyright violations turned out to be bogus and unfair resulting in its bankruptcy, but, says Jeffrey D. Neuburger in MediaShift, it would be too bad if the company did not survive long enough to pursue appeals lest newspapers lose ground in receiving just compensation for their work. -db

From a commentary for MediaShift, December 1, 2011, by Jeffrey D. Neuburger.

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A federal district judge in San Jose ruled that a blogger does not have to reveal his identity to the Art of Living Foundation that promotes spirituality lessons of Ravi Shankar. The blogger had published criticisms of the foundation along with one of  their manuals, an act that the foundation said infringed its copyright.

The judge said that so far the blogger’s First Amendment rights outweighed the foundation’s interests. -db

From The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, November 17, 2011, by Chris Healy.

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Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith R-Texas, expressed concerns over the scope of the Stop Online Piracy Act by saying that he was uncertain whether the Justice Department should be allowed to obtain court orders demanding that ISPs prevent users from visiting blacklisted websites, websites accused of infringing on intellectual property.

Under intense fire from the technology sector, it now appears that the bill will be amended. -db

From a commentary in Wired, November 16, 2011, by David Kravets.

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The webcast of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA was of such poor quality that the Internet community was effectively shut out until the question and answer period.

The community is also concerned that the committee is only asking one representative of the technology sector to testify. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, November 16, 2011, by Rainey Reitman.

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Legislation backed by the entertainment industry to protect copyrights by stopping online piracy , the Stop Online Piracy Act, has support in Congress.

But powerful interests including Google are poised to challenge the law if passed. -db

From a commentary for the First Amendment Center, November 17, 2011, by David L. Hudson Jr.

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France is shutting down citizen access to a website that allows posting of videos of police misconduct. It is the latest effort to limit online speech.

The latest attack on transparency came two years after an Amnesty International report that the country does a poor job of investigating police killings, beatings and racial abuse. -db

From a commentary for the Citizens Media Law Project, November 3, 2011 by Justin Silverman.

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A federal court in Nevada has given United States marshals authorization to seize over $63,000. in cash and/or assets from Righthaven. The Las Vegas copyright troll failed to pay a court judgment from August 15.

Righthaven tried to make an enterprise out of suing bloggers over copied newspaper articles, but it was revealed in court proceedings that Righthaven had not actually bought the copyrights of the articles. -db

From a commentary in Ars Technica, November 3, 2011, by Nate Anderson.

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A bipartisan anti-piracy bill introduced in the House of Representatives has the backing of the entertainment industry who want to expel copyright-infringing web sites from the Internet.

Internet companies and digital rights groups say the bill is heavy handed and poses a serious threat to free speech and innovation. -db

From CNet News, October 26, 2011, by Declan McCullagh.

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A man awarded legal fees for defending himself against a Righthaven copyright lawsuit asked a judge to authorize  U.S. Marshalls to seize Righthaven’s bank accounts, property and other assets. Righthaven missed the deadline to pay the $34,000 in fees.

Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson said his firm would be vindicated for suing the man who had published an editorial verbatim on the website to prompt discussion of public employee pensions. -db

From Wired, September 19, 2011, by David Kravets.

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The CEO of MediaNews Group declared it “a dumb idea” to sign up with the copyright troll Righthaven. Righthaven was founded over a year ago to make money by buying copyrights from news outlets then suing for copyright infringement.

Courts have recently ruled that the Righthaven agreements with the media did not actually result in true acquisition of the copyrights so Righthaven had no standing to sue for copyright infringement. -db

From Wired, September 8, 2011, by David Kravets.

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After dropping a similar suit in California in January, IHOP the restaurant chain is filing a new suit in Kansas City against the International House of Prayer (IHOP). IHOP the restaurant started to use the initials in 1973 and said it must protect its trademark with 45 of its 1500 restaurants in Missouri.

From The Kansas City Star, June 1, 2011, by Mark Morris.

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Righthaven is stubbornly digging in as Buzzfeed files a counter claim against them for faulty lawsuits. Buzzfeed is arguing that Righthavens suits, filed after news outlets transfer the right to sue to Righthaven to exact monetary damages, are an “abuse of process”.

Mike Masnick writes in TechDirt, “After documents were unsealed that show that the transfer of copyrights from the Las Vegas Journal-Review (and its parent company, Stephens Media) to Righthaven were almost certainly a sham transfer, designed solely to pass along ‘the right to sue’ (which is not a separately transferable right under copyright law), it seemed like Righthaven might finally have to suck it up and realize that its business model might be a disaster. Instead, it’s chosen to fight on, even as other courts have publicly raised concerns about the legitimacy of Righthaven’s efforts.” -db

From TechDirt, May 18, 2011, by Mike Masnick.

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In ruling against Righthaven in their suit against an Oregon nonprofit who posted an immigration article from the Las Vegas Review Journal, a U.S. District Court judge wrote, “[Righthaven's] litigation strategy has a chilling effect on potential fair uses of Righthaven-owned articles, diminishes public access to the facts contained therein, and does nothing to advance the Copyright Act’s purpose of promoting artistic creation.”

The judge wrote that the article was informational and deserved less protection than a creative entertainment piece and that Righthaven had not shown any harm to the value of the copyright since it was not operating as a traditional newspaper. -db

From the Courthouse News Service, April 25, 2011, by Tim Hull.

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In a thorough analysis of the Righthaven enterprise, Jeffrey D. Neuburger, a lawyer specializing in technology and media business, says it is not likely that Righthaven litigation will significantly curtail the re-posting of online news content with links to the source.

But the likelihood is getting sued by Righthaven for copyright violations is real so, says Neuburger, it is important for website providers who allow third party content to protect themselves with DMCA safe harbor provisions.-db

From an analysis in MediaShift, March 3, 2011, by Jeffrey D. Neuburger.

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Pop stars routinely limit photojournalists at concerts imposing rules including allowing only three shots, forbidding flashes, and pushing them far from the stage, but Lady Gaga has gone to the extreme by demanding ownership of the shots.

From her Photo Release Form: “Photographer hereby acknowledges and agrees that all right, title and interest (including copyright) in and to the Photograph(s) shall be owned by Lady Gaga and Photographer hereby transfers and assigns any such rights to Lady Gaga.” -db

From TBD, March3, 2011, by Andrew Beaujon, Jay Westcott.

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A former college football player filed a lawsuit on the grounds that his likeness in a videogame was misappropriated, that the game-maker Electronic Arts used his image for commercial gain without his permission.

In supporting Electronic Arts, the entertainment industry wants to limit celebrities’ intellectual property rights. A  lawyer for Electronic Arts said that films like “The Social Network” or “The King’s Speech” could not be made without the subject’s consent if the football player’s arguments prevail. -db

From Metropolitan News-Enterprise, February 16, 2011, combined staff and wire service reports.

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Righthaven, the company of lawyers that sues blogs and websites for posting articles from client newspapers, has announced it would no longer sue when the posting constitutes an excerpt. -db

Wired
November 18, 2010
By David Kravets

Copyright troll Righthaven this week promised to narrow its lawsuit campaign in the face of a courtroom defeat, when a judge ruled that a real estate website made “fair use” of a newspaper article from the Las Vegas-Review Journal.

Righthaven is the lawyer-heavy company based in Las Vegas that sprang to life last spring for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that repost, or even excerpt, Las Vegas-Review Journal articles without permission. It has filed about 150 lawsuits, and settled dozens of them in its favor.

But the company reached a snag when the Realty One Group fought back, winning a summary dismissal weeks ago. A Nevada judge agreed with the real estate firm’s argument that eight of 30 sentences from a Review Journal story about the real estate market qualified as fair use of the material.

With that precedent set, Righthaven no longer plans to sue websites for posting brief excerpts of newspaper articles, the company told a different federal judge in a separate case this week. “Righthaven does not anticipate filing any future lawsuits founded upon infringements of less than 75 percent of a copyrighted work, (.pdf) regardless of the outcome of the instant litigation,” Righthaven wrote the court.

There is no bright-line rule on how much one can excerpt from copyrighted content without breaching the Copyright Act, which carries fines of up to $150,000 per violation. But Righthaven told the Nevada court it “anticipates that the number of Righthaven copyright suits premised upon partial (rather than full, or nearly full) textual reproductions will continue to decline in the immediate future.”

The mea culpa, of sorts, came in a case that pits Righthaven against the political community site Democratic Underground. Righthaven filed the lawsuit after a user posted four paragraphs from a 34-paragraph Review-Journal story on Sharron Angle, the unsuccessful Republican Nevada candidate for Senate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation jumped in to defend Democratic Underground and counter-sued Righthaven for abusing copyright law.

Righthaven on Monday asked U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt to dismiss its original claim against Democratic Underground, and the EFF’s counterclaim, essentially crying “no harm, no foul.” It asks that Democratic Underground and the EFF not be awarded legal fees and costs, because Righthaven claims it still could win if it really wanted to.

Neither the EFF nor Righthaven immediately responded for comment.

Righthaven’s lawsuits frequently take advantage of a loophole in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Many of its more than 150 lawsuits arise not from articles posted by a website’s proprietors but from comments and forum posts by the site’s readers. Under the DMCA, a website normally enjoys effective immunity from civil copyright liability for user content, provided it promptly removes infringing material at the request of a rightsholder.

But to dock that legal safe harbor, a site has to register an official contact point for DMCA takedown notices, a process that involves filling out a form and mailing a $105 check to the government. An examination of Righthaven’s lawsuits targeting user content suggests it’s specifically going after sites that failed to fill out that paperwork.

Copyright 2010 Condé Nast Digital     FAC Content Use Policy

The financial news service Briefing.com admitted violating copyright law by copying over 100 stories from Dow Jones and paid an undisclosed substantial penalty. -db

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
November 17, 2010
By Rosemary Lane

Financial news service Briefing.com settled a lawsuit with Dow Jones & Co. last week after the website admitted to violating the federal Copyright Act and “hot news” doctrine by systematically republishing time-sensitive headlines and articles from Dow Jones.

Chicago-based Briefing.com paid an undisclosed but “substantial” amount of money and admitted culpability in infringing on the Copyright Act by republishing more than 100 of Dow Jones’ articles, according to a Dow Jones press release. The website also admitted breaching the “hot news” doctrine, which bars continuously republishing a news organization’s time-sensitive stories.

Dow Jones filed a lawsuit in April in the U.S. District Court in New York City after it discovered Briefing.com copied and republished more than 100 news articles and 70 headlines within minutes of their publication on the Dow Jones Newswires during a two-week period, the press release said. The Newswires include articles from The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

“This settlement demonstrates that such actions are not resolved with a simple slap on the wrist, but have significant financial repercussions,” Mark Jackson, general counsel for Dow Jones, said in the release.

In addition to the undisclosed payment, Briefing.com has also agreed to an injunction that bars it from ever infringing upon Dow Jones’ content. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York approved the settlement.

Lawyers for Briefing.com did not return calls seeking comment.

The “hot news” doctrine was established in 1918 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in International News Service v. Associated Press that news organizations could obtain injunctions against competitors who continuously misappropriate and republish time-sensitive stories, taking away commercial gain from the original publisher.

The formerly arcane doctrine has recently become a hot-button issue. This year, three major financial firms sued financial news aggregation website Theflyonthewall.com for “hot news” misappropriation after the website circulated the firms’ investment research without approval. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard the news aggregator’s appeal of an injunction in August, but has yet to issue a ruling.

Similarly, the AP settled a lawsuit with website All Headline News in 2009 after the site republished AP stories without attribution.

David Tomlin, associate general counsel for the AP, said he’s skeptical that the Dow Jones case will influence future cases because it is a settlement and because “hot news” cases are usually decided on the case’s individual facts.

“I can only speculate that because intellectual property has been increasingly surfacing as a major topic of interest and sensitivity because of the Internet, every remedy for what content owners view as infringement is going to be tested for its value in every case,” he said.

Copyright 2010 The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press      FAC Content Use Policy

A copyright enforcement service has filed a lawsuit seeking $150,000 from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting two newspaper articles without authorization.

The Register

September 8, 2010

By Dan Goodin

A copyright enforcement service has filed a lawsuit seeking $150,000 from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting two newspaper articles without authorization.

The complaint, which was filed in US District Court in Las Vegas, is at least the 117th lawsuit to be filed since March by Righthaven LLC, a controversial group that sues websites mostly on behalf of The Las Vegas Review-Journal, according to The Las Vegas Sun. In the vast majority of the cases, Righthaven obtains the rights to the copied work after detecting the infringement and then files a complaint seeking damages of $75,000 and rights to the domain name of the infringing site.

In almost all the cases, Righthaven files suit with no warning and without first requesting the website remove the copyrighted material. Groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation have labeled Righthaven a “patent troll” that is abusing the intellectual property system and have offered to defy the group.

The latest suit takes action against Angle for posting two Review-Journal articles critical of her opponent, US Senator Harry Reid, on her website. The group is seeking possession of her domain name, sharronangle.com, but in a departure from previous actions, it is seeking $150,000 in damages.

The Sun reports Righthaven has now brought at least 117 such actions against a wide variety of sites, including the Democratic Party of Nevada, The Democratic Underground and the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

Copyright 2010 The Register

FAC Content Use Policy

Righthaven, a company that sues bloggers who repost news content without prermission, has expanded its operation to a second newspaper chain, the Arkansas-based WEHCO Media. -db

Wired
August 30, 2010
By David Kravets

A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain.

Righthaven LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of infringement.

Until now, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson’s sole announced client had been Nevada-based Stephens Media. Righthaven has issued more than 100 lawsuits since its spring inception on behalf of the Las Vegas Review Journal — Stephens’ flagship.

“I can tell you we also have near finalization for contracts with a substantial number of other publishers,” Gibson said in a telephone interview. He declined to divulge their names until Righthaven begins filing suits on their behalf.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has received “several dozen” inquiries from Righthaven defendants seeking legal representation, said Eva Galperin, the EFF’s referral coordinator.

“We’re up to our armpits in Righthaven defendants,” she said in a telephone interview.

The EFF, she said, has yet to take a case and has been helping the defendants obtain other counsel, she said.

For its part, WEHCO controls 28 papers, including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, and 13 cable stations largely in the south. Its president, Paul Smith, said in a Democrat-Gazette story last week that “it’s a pretty serious matter when someone takes your copy, information you’ve spent a lot of money to produce.”

Smith did not return a telephone message seeking comment.

In July, Gibson told Threat Level that more Righthaven clients would be forthcoming. He also gave a brief accounting of how Righthaven works. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, Righthaven acquires the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission.

Righthaven usually demands $75,000, but will settle for a few thousand dollars.

Copyright 2010 Condé Nast Digital         FAC Content Use Policy

Coraline and Stardust author Neil Gaiman is owed royalties for three more characters that appeared in artist Todd McFarlane’s classic Spawn comic book series, a federal judge has ruled.

News

August 3, 2010

By The Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. — U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled last week that the demon Dark Ages Spawn and two scantily clad female angels, Domina and Tiffany, were derived from characters Gaiman created. Spawn tells the story of a murdered CIA agent who becomes a demon and is hunted by angels.

A jury found eight years ago that Gaiman was due money for being a co-copyright holder for three other characters that appeared in the comic series — Medieval Spawn, Angela and a character named Cogliostro, a one-time Spawn ally. Neither side has agreed on how much is owed.

Gaiman testified in June that he believed Dark Ages Spawn was essentially a copy of Medieval Spawn, a character he created in the ninth issue of the Spawn series in 1993. He had been invited by McFarlane to do an issue. Gaiman also said the angels known as Domina and Tiffany were copies of the red-haired Angela, a character who also debuted in Spawn No. 9.

Crabb agreed, saying all three characters were substantially similar to the ones Gaiman created.

“Certainly they are similar enough to be infringing if they had been produced and sold by someone other than the copyright owners,” she wrote. Crabb ordered McFarlane to tell Gaiman by Sept. 1 how much money had been earned through the use of the characters in posters, trading cards, clothing, action figures, comic books and anything else where they appeared.

Gaiman’s attorney Allen Arntsen says he hopes that a final accounting of how much Gaiman is owed will be done by the end of the year.

“This has been drawn out,” Arntsen said. “We’re looking forward to bringing it to a resolution.”

Alex Grimsley, McFarlane’s attorney, did not return a message seeking comment in time for this story.

Gaiman commented on the ruling in a July 30 blog entry, saying he wants to “forget this forever.”

“I wish I took some kind of joy in this, but I don’t,” Gaiman wrote. “At this point all I hope is that Todd can do an accounting for all the comics I wrote for which he paid no royalties, and the rest of it; and that he’ll settle up and I will make some comics charities very happy.”

McFarlane created Spawn in 1992 for a startup comic book company, Image Comics. Although it isn’t as popular as Batman or Spider-Man, the series has been fairly successful with action figures, an Emmy-winning HBO series and a 1997 movie that grossed $87 million worldwide.

Crabb noted in her ruling that in the Spawn universe, there is only one Spawn that comes to Earth every 400 years and McFarlane never explained why he introduced two knights from the same century.

If McFarlane really wanted to create a new Spawn, Crabb wondered why he didn’t make him a Portuguese explorer from the 16th century, an officer in the Royal Navy in the 18th century, a Roman gladiator, an American Indian warrior or a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth.

McFarlane argued that the internal rules of the Spawn universe were constantly changing and that while both characters existed in the same time period, they were distinct and different.

Crabb didn’t buy it.

“It seems far more than coincidence that Dark Ages Spawn is a knight from the same century as Medieval Spawn,” the judge wrote.

In addition to Spawn, McFarlane illustrated a number of big-time superheroes, including Batman and Spider-Man, before co-founding Image Comics. He also manufactures action figures and made headlines in 1999 when he paid $3 million for the baseball Mark McGwire hit for his then-record 70th home run in a season.

Gaiman, who lives in northwestern Wisconsin near the Twin Cities, wrote the “Sandman” comic book series. His novels include American Gods, Coraline and The Graveyard Book, which won the John Newbery Medal.

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

The New York Times
News

August 2, 2010

By Trip Gabriel

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.

“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”

Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.

She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.

Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

The notion that there might be a new model young person, who freely borrows from the vortex of information to mash up a new creative work, fueled a brief brouhaha earlier this year with Helene Hegemann, a German teenager whose best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from others.

Instead of offering an abject apology, Ms. Hegemann insisted, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” A few critics rose to her defense, and the book remained a finalist for a fiction prize (but did not win).

That theory does not wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who said that relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.”

“You’re not coming up with new ideas if you’re grabbing and mixing and matching,” said Ms. Wilensky, who took aim at Ms. Hegemann in a column in her student newspaper headlined “Generation Plagiarism.”

“It may be increasingly accepted, but there are still plenty of creative people — authors and artists and scholars — who are doing original work,” Ms. Wilensky said in an interview. “It’s kind of an insult that that ideal is gone, and now we’re left only to make collages of the work of previous generations.”

In the view of Ms. Wilensky, whose writing skills earned her the role of informal editor of other students’ papers in her freshman dorm, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.

The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.

“If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly,” she said.

At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.

Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.

And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.