Online content theft will always be a hot topic among authors and publishers, and the boundaries between book and web continue to evolve, so I'm surprised that I haven't seen more ebook blogs discussing Google's new authorship markup concept. About a month ago, the search engine announced that it would start tracking a new markup tag that identifies the author of a particular post or article, then connect that to other pieces with the same tag, even across different domains. Although it won't prevent others from appropriating content without permission, it provides a way to build a Google-validated web of...

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What’s in a name? A lot, really. Take the issue of “piracy”—most commonly used in Internet circles to refer to unauthorized distribution of other peoples’ intellectual property. Its use in that sense actually pre-dates the Internet by a considerable length of time (see video at bottom). For a long time, a debate on whether this is an appropriate use of the term has raged. Representing those who do not think the term is properly used, the Free Software Foundation has this to say: Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as...

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