Ethics and Publishing

Pirate Bay founders and employees found guilty of copyright violation even though Pirate Bay hosts no copyrighted content. A potentially large blow to P2P systems.

Authors and readers respond to Amazon's "glitch." I found this link through poet Mark Doty, who writes incredible poetry and happens to be gay. His books were among those that "disappeared."

The E.U. and the U.K. are usually more diligent the the U.S. in protecting the privacy of the public, but not in this case of cooperation between ISPs and a the manufacturer of an invasive targeted marketing device.

Google suffered a setback in a legal battle over how it auctions search terms. How would eventual defeat affect the Web search market?.

Discussion of Amazon's decision to remove sales rank information from LGBT themed content.

Amazon claims dog ate homework and glitch caused hundreds of lesbian and gay books to lose their sales rank.

Analysis of Google's policy on privacy.

Concern the the Google-AAP settlement gives Google an unfair advantage wrt to orphan books and may inhibit scholarly access to these out-of-print works.

Using Web 2.0 to put the spotlight on censorship.

JAMA tries to hush up a scientist whistle-blower reporting on a conflict of interest involving an investigator and a sponsoring company.

Carll Malamud's campaign to be nominated Public Printer of the United States, head of the Government Printing Office.

Censorship is alive and well in countries from China to Great Britain to the US, and governments are getting cooperation from ISPs, making for a very dangerous situation.

Read the original article by Darnton first and then also see the full text of Courant reply on his blog at http://paulcourant.net/2009/02/04/google-robert-darnton-and-the-digital-republic-of-letters/

No surprise here: Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has a viral infection. For once, however, it's not the Norovirus but that new-fangled byproduct of Web 2.0, the viral marketing infiltration. ... So what's the big deal? Well, it seems that the "Royal Champions" weren't always up front about their status as compensated reviewers, effectively misleading readers of CruiseCritic forums with their positive comments.

"If copying is the sincerest form of flattery, then journals are publishing a lot of amazingly flattering science. Of course to most of us, the authors of such reports would best be labeled plagiarists - and warrant censure, not praise."