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Diana Gabaldon recently lit up certain areas of the blogosphere with a post ranting against fanfiction writers. In particular, she stated her displeasure at people writing fanfiction about her books. Her reasons basically boiled down to the fact that she considered fanfiction as stealing her work. She described it as 'immoral'. The main response to her post was negative - there was several posts made in response, not to mention the responses on the post itself. I've posted one here - by an author who got her start writing Harry Potter fanfic. I can't post the original Gabaldon post, or her follow-up post - she's taken them down. The issue really highlighted the changing use of copyrighted material on the internet, and how that use is at odds with the current view of copyright.

The article talks about "Access Controlled", a new book from the Open Net Initiative that examines the new second and third generation filtering techniques employed by governments such as Russia and Belarus that are far more subtle than China's 'Great Firewall' but can censor unwanted content as effectively.