January 2012

Plagiarized editions for sale in Amazon’s Kindle store show how the company is still adapting to the world of original content creation.

At the same time, the stolen books may also present a test of the retailer’s ability to rely on a widely used legal shield that protects content sites from being accused of copyright infringement. Spammy and stolen e-books—either plagiarized copies of copyrighted works by other authors, or books thrown together from “private label rights” (PLR) content, which can be bought very cheaply online and quickly formatted into multiple e-books—have long been a problem in the Kindle store. “We’ve found that the folks spreading PLR are also more likely to be plagiarists of real book content” as well, says Mark Coker, the CEO of e-book publishing platform Smashwords (a competitor of Amazon’s self-publishing platform). In many instances, Coker says, plagiarized and PLR content banned by Smashwords still appears in the Kindle and Nook stores. He says those stores don’t vet content as thoroughly as Smashwords does.

Are you ready to rock? Michelle You was while attending school in Beijing, but it was hard to find information about live concerts. Later, at the University at Cambridge, she still missed rock and roll and attending shows. Out of that frustration came the idea for Songkick, a site that scans your music library and informs you when your favorite bands and singers are playing in your area.

There's nothing illegal about being so big that you dominate a market. But when Google unveiled a new feature last week called Search Plus Your World, some antitrust experts believe Google stepped over the line.

Google's new feature risks abusing the company's dominant position in the search market to stifle competition from its rivals. That could be against the law. "Google runs a very high risk of being found in violation of antitrust and competition laws," said Ted Henneberry, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe's antitrust group. "The issue raised by Google's new announcement is how it potentially increases its dominance and furthers its discriminatory treatment of rivals." Search Plus Your World tailors search results to each individual user by tapping into Google's social network, Google+. Search results now include Google+ posts and profiles. Noticeably absent from the feature are the much larger social networks of Facebook and Twitter, or any other social service. Google insists that its users benefit from Search Plus Your World, and that the company has no legal duty to boost its rivals' services. "The laws are designed to help consumers benefit from innovation, not to help competitors," said Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for Google.

When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the "Minnesota nice," a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs National Public Radio’s future and perhaps even its soul -- as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target of the partisan sniping of the sound-bite era. A look at how NPR’s management managed to squander the advantages of the national dole, deep-pocketed donors, a roster of top-notch reporters, and the loyalty of legions of devoted Click and Clack fans—and whether it can recover from the annus horribilis of 2011.