Basking in glory after orchestrating a record punishment for a petty file-sharer in the US, the RIAA takes its legal campaign to the next level. Many may want newsgroups to stay under the radar but it’s too late - major labels have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com and it won’t be going away.

" It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it.

Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved over time from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them...

a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

This article asks the over-simplified question, "Are property rights in ideas unethical?" The article is flawed, but worth reading. The author concludes that the IP system should change somewhat (how he doesn't specify) to accommodate free content. However, he also holds that free content is inherently dependent on proprietary content.