Public Service Announcement

There's a lot of general discussion of copyright and plagiarism on my flist this week. Some of it is useful; a lot of it is riddled with misconceptions and opinion masquerading as fact (e.g., John Scalzi's position that most fanfic is probably illegal).

If I have time this weekend I will dig up and post a set of very simplified legal definitions of some of the terms that have been tossed about lately (Public Domain, Fair Use, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Plagiarism, etc.) that were written by a team of expert intellectual property lawyers for the general public to use.

Meanwhile, I strongly urge my flist to look at the following website and bookmark it before trying to untangle copyright law too much more. This is the best website out there on the topic for general use:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

Especially the section on fair use:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/index.html