Wrap Up: Newspapers Attack Google News
By Jonathan Bailey • Feb 7th, 2006 • Category: ArticlesAs usual, there’s a lot going on in plagiarism and content theft news this week. It seems that not a week goes by without copyright infringement winding up in the news in some major way.
Also as usual, there just wasn’t enough time to cover it all so, without any further ado, here’s a look at some of the major goings on this week in the news of plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Newspapers Launch Offensive on Google News
The World Association of Newspapers, a Paris-based lobbying group that represents newspapers across the globe, has accused Google, and it’s specialized Google News site, of building a new medium on their backs.
The Google News site, which runs no ads and only uses short exerpts from published articles, linking exclusively to the original source, recently ended its Beta testing making it a completed product.
The World Association of Newspapers has asked the European Commission to look into whether news aggregation services such as Google News violate their copyrights and, if they are found to, the reverbrations will be felt all over the globe.
Others, however, have been left to wonder how a service that runs no ads, drives traffic to newspaper’s Web sites and provides free publicity to news sources of all varieties can be considered a bad thing.
Nonetheless, this will be an interesting story to follow as it develops.
1Up Covers Video Game Plagiarism
1Up.com, previously involved in a very tense plagiarism scandal regarding one of its game guides, is now talking about a very different kind of plagiarism, plagiarism in the video game world itself.
The site, which is owned by Ziff Davis Media, published a special feature entitled “Retro Rip Offs: Some of the Most Egregious Plagiarisms in Classic Gaming?. The feature covers over a dozen of instances of plagiarism in the golden age of gaming, some well known, others not.
It’s a very interesting read that also delves into some of the court cases to arise out of alleged video game plagiarism. The cases, which had very different outcomes, showcase exactly how fickle copyright conflicts can be when they reach the inside of a courtroom.
All in all, the article is a must-read for those interested in video games, copyright law, or just technology itself.
ESBN Launches Mac OS X Widget
Finally, the great news from the ESBN community keeps coming. Users of Mac OS X can now create ESBNs from their desktop by installing a widget provided on the ESBN Web site.
Like the ESBN Firefox Extension, which also received an update since my last article, the widget allows users to quickly and easily create ESBN numbers without having to visit the Web site.
In related news, this site is now using ESBNs to identify posts. Though previously I was planning on waiting for the Wordpress plugins to automate the process, however, given the sudden rise in popularity of ESBNs, I’ve decided to go ahead and apply it here.
Needless to say, I’m very excited about that and look forward to seeing how it develops.
[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, Copyright, Video Games, News Papers, Google, Google News, ESBN, Copyright Law, Wordpress[/tags]
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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