3 Count: Roll D6 for Litigation

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: Wizards Pulls PDFs, Sues Eight for Copyright Infringement

First off today, a company known by nerds and geeks the world over (myself included), Wizards of the Coast, has pulled its purchasable PDFs from its site and filed suit against eight people that it accuses of sharing those aforementioned PDFs via file sharing networks.

If you do not know who Wizards of the Coast is, meaning that you are probably reasonably popular and socially adjusted, they are the makers of Magic the Gathering card game as well as the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. The PDFs in questions were downloadable handbooks for their games, which they apparently have a way to tie back to the individual that uploaded them as they claim that all eight of these people purchased copies and then made them available via file sharing networks.

2: National Federation for the Blind protest at Authors Guild in NYC today over Kindle text-to-speech

In more serious news today, the controversy between the Author’s Guild and Amazon over the Kindle 2 text to speech feature is continuing. Weighing in this time are the National Federation for the Blind and the Reading Rights Coalition, an organization that represents people who cannot read print.

According to the organizations, the complaints by the Author’s Guild, which resulted in the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature being enabled only on books that permit it, will hinder access to books to those that can not read printed words, including those who are blind or dyslexic.

The groups protested outside of Amazon’s New York headquarters yesterday in an attempt to make their arguments heard.

3: Some questions related to Google News and the Associated Press

Finally today, in response to some of the AP’s comments talked about in yesterday’s 3 Count, Google has filed a response, saying that it works closely and even partners with news agencies to display the content that it does and, for the uses that aren’t licensed, it feels fair use protects it.

Google went on to say that they, “Drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models — whether news sources choose to host their articles with us or on their own sites, and whether their business model is ad-supported or based on subscriptions.”

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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