One of the hardest parts of dealing with plagiarism and content theft is finding out who to contact to report it. Though the DMCA requires hosts to designate an agent to receive such complaints if they want to be eligible for safe harbor, the information is often buried and hard to locate.
To help with that [...]

Recently, British phtographer Lara Jade recently discovered than a self-portrait she took of herself when she was fourteen was being used on the cover of a porn DVD without her permission.
Almost at the same time, American fractal artist Deb Walker discovered that some of her artwork was stolen, some of it being sold as prints [...]

Rachel Radison is a New Orleans-based mortgage broker. After seeing the difficult home-buying climate in the city following Hurricane Katrina, she decided that she could help would-be buyers with her know how.
Radison, having heard about these new Web sites called “blogs” decided to create one herself and obtained a Wordpress.com account. However, her ignorance about [...]

Aricle Updated: See Below
Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is heralded as one of the top photographers on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Guðleifsdóttir, a native of Iceland, is well known for her self-portraits as well as her surreal landscapes.
However, she recently discovered that a photo printing site had not only posted several of her works under a false name [...]

Rachel Hyman works in a bar in New York City. Part of her job involves confiscating fake IDs from underage patrons that are attempting to drink illegally.
Recently, Hyman took one of those fake IDs and posted it to her blog. When she discovered that the fake ID was in the person’s real name, she redacted [...]

When it comes to matters of content theft, administrators at community sites face a very different set of challenges. Whether the site is a forum, a wiki or a collaborative blog, the content is valuable, but it is also difficult to protect.
The problem is that the community admin, the person usually in the best position [...]

Following the controversy over its copyright policy last week, Fark has changed the wording of its policy to correct the errors in the first draft.
The new policy, which is much longer than the first, no longer attempts to claim copyright ownership of the submissions, but rather, says the following regarding works submitted to the site: [...]

An announcement on the United States Copyright Office (USCO) Web site announces the upcoming start of electronic filing this summer.
According to the announcement, some time this summer the USCO will begin beta testing their online registration system with “limited number of participants”. Once the testing is complete, the USCO will make the system [...]

First off, as always, welcome to all new users from Digg. I’m glad to see you here and I hope that you stick around for a bit.
On that note, it has been a crazy 24 hours for Digg and for myself. It appears that, without meaning to, I’ve been dragged into a controversy that is [...]

Previously, I reported about how plagiarized content can create unique challeges on social news sites such as Digg and Reddit.
The article detailed a case involving the site Celebrity Hack, a celebrity gossip blog. The site had one of its articles, entitled “37 Famously Stupid Celebrity Quotes” submitted to Digg only to be buried for unknown [...]