* Astronomy

Sites go offline in US piracy laws protest

A number of high-profile websites are taking part in a 24-hour "blackout" to protest against two bills being considered by Congress to tackle copyright infringement.
The House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) are designed to block access to sites containing unauthorised copyright material.
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Late last year in the UK the infamous "Gowers Report" on intellectual property was issued, while it recommended not extending copyright terms on performances, some of us felt that the report was too balanced for its own good. Gowers seemed to go out of his way to make sure the report gave a little to everyone -- and therefore basically gave nothing to anyone. Rather than looking at the fundamental issues, it just tried to give a little bit here to one side and a little bit there to another. Of course, the copyright term extension got the most attention -- with supporters of term extension mistakenly thinking that copyright is a welfare system to perpetually support musicians rather than an incentive system for the creation of new content. Now that the report is all published and done with, apparently Andrew Gowers is willing to admit that when they did their actual research and investigation, they found that the economic evidence supported making copyright terms even shorter than the existing 50 years.

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Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math has a very supportive article up summarizing my tangle with lawyers yesterday over the 'fair use' of a figure from the fruit antioxidant paper.
In short, I was threatened with legal action if I didn't take it down immediately. I used a panel a figure, and a chart, from over 10+ figures in the paper. I cited and reported everything straight forwardly. I would think they'd be happy to get the press. But alas, no.
I got around them by complying, but reproducing the figures myself in Excel. They didn't bother me anymore, as apparently that's 100% legal and ok.
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Tomorrow the hammer's coming down hard over the 'Fair Use' issue, at ScienceBlogs and hopefully around the blogosphere. Quite a few of my fellow SciBlings have pledged to post about this issue, as it affects us all (not only all of us, but all of you too.)
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A Brussels court ruled Tuesday that Google had violated copyright laws by publishing links to articles from Belgian newspapers without permission. Legal experts said the case could have broad implications in Europe for the news indexes provided by search engines.

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A ruling against Google in a copyright case in Belgium may influence courts in other European countries, but not the United States where laws are more permissible, copyright lawyers said Tuesday.

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