LISNews: Librarian News

Forbes has a Piece on The 200-year-old U.S. Patent Office and how it is beginning to show its age.

They say after 200 years of lumbering down the tracks, the intellectual-property process in the United States is beginning to go off the rails. Branches of the government are intervening where they never have before. Opposing camps, many with money and influence, are forming. Small inventors are diverted from where they can make the greatest contributions. And a culture of litigation, circumvention, and secrecy has evolved from an area where openness and law had long ruled.

Illegal copies of Star Wars and Spider Man have already hit the black market, driving the occurrence of Net piracy to an all time high. According to statistics, the figures are up 20% from last year. More.

Jen writes \"

A tiny DVD software tools company is ducking the Hollywood giants and challenging U.S. copyright laws. 321 Studios fears the studios want to squash it for selling software that lets you make lesser-quality copies of DVD movies. So it has asked a San Francisco court to declare that its DVD Copy Plus program does not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The 1998 DMCA, reviled by proponents of fair use and free digital speech, deems it illegal to provide information or tools that circumvent copy control technology. Full Story
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The Chronicle\'s investigation unearthed a lot of evidence that a Cornell
professor repeatedly took credit for research done by a graduate student. 
The school\'s investigator called it \"\"permissible academic entrepreneurial
behavior.\"\"  The student feels she\'s had her \"\"life destroyed by a
thief.\"\"

\"After
a professor took credit for a graduate student\'s research, Cornell found
little amiss.\" ... \"interviews with Ms. Demas [the grad student], her
professors, and Cornell officials, as well as a review of hundreds of pages
of court records, correspondence, and other documents, paint a stark case
of academic misappropriation.\" -By Scott Smallwood
-Chronicle/free

LISNews Keywords: 
plagiarism
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An ounce of acknowledgment is worth a pound of legal cure.
-Hermit :-!