fair use

When Sarah Palin protested after gossip site Gawker posted pages from her upcoming book America By Heart, Gawker taunted her for her lack of knowledge about copyright law. But a federal judge has ordered Gawker to take the pages down temporarily.

When DailyFinance reporter Jon Berr's wife posted a brief video on YouTube of their 3-year-old son dancing to Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, she never expected to become part of the complex fight over copyright and fair use on the Internet.

Just what constitutes "fair use" of copyrighted material has always been hard to define. Now a new website, Mediaite.com, is using that ambiguity to build a business model on other companies' content.

iPhone and e-Book users may be feeling a bit more liberated, following an announcement Monday that loosens the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provisions. Basically, the ruling means folks can legally disable the restrictive software controls on devices like Apple's iPhone or Amazon's Kindle.

Copyright and fair use doctrine were at the heart of a recent debate about how news organizations are going to make money in the digital age -- if indeed they are.

Rupert Murdoch is sending mixed signals. Under no circumstances does he think the federal government ought to step in and help float newspaper publishers through their current difficulties. But the key to the future solvency of news organizations lies, he suggests, in government hands. Confused...