News item: A music blogger was arrested for posting several not-yet-released songs by the rock band Guns N' Roses. Prosecutors argued the leak could cause a financial loss for the band.
News item: A federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the creator of a Harry Potter fan Web site cannot publish a guidebook to the fictional series because it would infringe on J.K. Rowling's novels and a similar "lexicon" she plans herself.
News item: United Airlines shares plummet after a six-year-old story about a 2002 bankruptcy filing wrongly got posted to a news site, triggering a stock sell-off.
Welcome to the Internet age: Never before has so much been appropriated by so many.
Long before bloggers, the tape recorder or the mimeograph machine, the authors of the U.S. Constitution understood the importance of giving protection to the works of individuals.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," was among the responsibilities the forefathers laid out for the new Congress, just after the power to establish post offices and before the power to declare war.
Revisions were relatively few and far between before the recording and copying machines came along in the last half of the last century. But those devices paled next to the Internet's reach.
"It's easy with the Internet to spread things and it's hard to keep it contained," said Ned T. Himmelreich, a Baltimore attorney who specializes in intellectual property cases. "There are different categories of people who spread this stuff: People who don't know, people who don't care or people who purposely spit in the face of the owners."
The Guns N' Roses case appears to fall squarely in the latter category.
A 27-year-old blogger named Kevin Cogill was arrested by the FBI last month, appeared in court and was released on bail for a hearing later this week. He is suspected of streaming songs from a not-yet-released album that Guns N' Roses has had in the works for more than a decade.
His Web site seemed to revel in the breach, tweaking the band's leader Axl Rose and producer Geffen Records.
