I’m not sure about the details of the argument but it is interesting the tension between Information & Content being freely available via the web and copyright.
As a blogger I produce Free content myself. Even though I don’t get paid for my words I would like to have control over them and I don’t want others to copy my work and use it on their site without my permission or knowledge.
Actually, once I did find 1,000s of my words had been randomly copied and put on another site – across about 15 web pages. I went through the google complaint about Plagiarism process and eventually the site was closed. It took almost a year, I think, and it is only applicable if the problem site carries google adverts.
Lots of people do not realise that it is a breach of copyright and it is plagiarism to just copy and paste huge chunks from someone else’s website and use it on your own with out any credit or permission from the author.
I think that people who want to make a living from creating art – such as films, music or books – should have control over their work and be paid for it if they want to be.
As I understand it, the Wikipedia protest is not about doing away with copyright but how to protect & enforce copyright in a fair way. You can read about the protest etc here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
Plagiarism has, and remains, a problem for a lot of webmasters. It’s one of the reasons that Google introduced ‘Panda’ that prevents sites that farm content from getting good rankings. It’s not perfect but we live in an imperfect world.
Over the past 12 months google search engine is returning poor results for a lot of the things I search for. Particularly aannoying it will bring up really old articles / replys and posts not new ones… on things where the old is really out of date.
Any suggestions for a really good search engine is welcome xx