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not actually news, but an interesting article on plagiarism from 2007. "The idea that culture can be property-intellectual property-is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone." What do you all think of Lethem's article?

Viacom is maintaining its 2007 billion dollar lawsuit against Google (as it acquired YouTube in 2006), despite the latter continuous fervent denial. Though "Google argues that when YouTube promptly took down tens of thousands of videos after Viacom gave it notice, YouTube was within provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Viacom is stating that the infringement is taking the form of violating the 1998 Copyright Act. Which holds both content owners and systems operators responsible for the protection of copyrighted content online. After reading this article, a few questions come to mind: What can Google do to appease and keep the "integrity" of YouTube? and Isn't it interesting that Viacom only filed this $1 billion lawsuit AFTER Google had acquired YouTube? What can we say about interested parties possibly abusing copyright law?

"Surveys have found the number of people who think digital copyright infringement is wrong has increased from 34% in 2007 to 54% in 2010." The keyword here being "think." Just because we know it's wrong doesn't mean we'll stop doing it.