3 Count: Now We Wait

This is daily column on Plagiarism Today where the site brings you three of the days biggest, most important copyright and plagiarism news links. If you want to offer your feedback on the column, use the contact form or just follow me on Twitter at @plagiarismtoday.

1: Pirate Bay Day 11: trial ends, verdict awaited

First off today, The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden has come to an end after just eleven days. At the end of the trial, both sides expressed confidence that they would emerge victorious when the verdict is announced on April 17.

General consensus seems to be that neither side did themselves any favors during the trial, prosecutors repeatedly embarrassed themselves on technology issues and The Pirate Bay admins, according to reports, abandoned much of their ideals in exchange for a denial of responsibility.

Now all we can do is wait.

2: Research copyright bill would end free health info

Also today, The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act is getting some attention in the media. The bill seeks to reverse a previous National Institutes of Health policy that made it so that the results from taxpayer-funded research would be made available to the public for no charge. The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mi, would put those works back in to copyright protection and make it so that the public would have to pay.

The bill has many detractors including patient, taxpayer and free culture advocates that are upset that taxpayers may be denied the results of research their dollars were used to fund.

The bill is current in committee.

3: Uploading Fake Torrents

Finally today, a post on a freelancer site has been gartering some attention on Reddit among other sites. The job posting calls for a user to “pload Movie torrents that are new and with popular tracker names like Axxo , HDTV and others”. The practice is commonly used as an anti-piracy method but is very controversial and has caused a lot of backlash from bittorrent users.

Currently the project has an offered price of $30-$250, has 23 bids with an average bid of $78. It is unclear at this time if this is the action of a movie studio, an anti-piracy company or some other organization.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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