Lecture Notes and Copyright

Anything an instructor says or presents in a classroom belongs solely to the instructor and not the university or the students.

This innate invocation of the right to Copyright original spoken and written material belongs solely to the mind creating the information: The Instructor.

If a student or university takes notes based on a lecture and then posts those notes online or re-sells them to other students or businesses for distribution, the Instructor's Copyright has been violated and the student must pay for that intellectual property violation.

If students or colleges record video or audio of an Instructor lecture -- without explicit, written, permission -- the same law and punishment apply: Recording material you do not create and then distributing it later for profit -- or not -- violates the creator's initial right to control their own material.

Instructors are morally required to vigorously defend their Copyright in any and all circumstances and, if they must, reap the rewards of their intellectual rip-offs.

Infringing on the Amazon Mark: Kindle Websites

Amazon has a winner in the Kindle e-book and that kind of success demands imitators who want to make money off the Kindle brand by creating source websites or fan pages by using some form of a Kindle-ized URL.

Amazon is forced by these pretend fans to fight them in legal letters and in a court of law, if necessary, because to use the Kindle trademark without explicit permission from Amazon is to infringe upon the innate rights of Amazon.

It doesn't matter if one is celebrating the Kindle or not, no one may use Amazon's brand or intellectual property or the physical manifestations thereof for their own claimed private use on the public web. Intention does not matter. Usage matters.

We applaud Amazon's rightful need to protect their time and investment in the Kindle brand and even if small website owners -- or domain stealers -- complain and cry on their websites and in their blogs about Big Bad Amazon, we can only try to pity them for their transparent attempt to slide along for the ride on the bare back of the Kindle wave.

Does Copyright Matter?

With the advent of online publication, does Copyright matter any longer?

With RSS feeds spewing new content into the world directly every day can a person claim Copyright to their original material if they are unable to enforce their right and prosecute infringement?

If you give your work away for free, can you still own it if others take your work, revitalize it, repackage it, and use it to create profit?

How can we begin to protect our Copyrighted work if there are no longer firewalls and safety implements to shield the work from thieves?