Have you ever found a great recipe in a cookbook and photocopied it? If you have, then you've been exercising your "fair use" rights to copyright. In other words, even though an artist or publisher owns the rights to that book, movie, or song, you can still do a few things with that book even if you don't own it. Like check it out from a library!

Copyright geeks have been abuzz this month because a new report suggests that those few exceptions to copyright are worth big bucks: $507 billion in 2006, nearly 20% of U.S. GDP, to be exact. Or at least so says the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a business group representing such heavy hitters as Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

Okay, so maybe you copying that recipe didn't really spur the creation of new jobs. But the fact that Google, Yahoo, Ask, and their cohorts can crawl through websites (another fair use exception), even though those sites are copyrighted, certainly did. Which begs the question: should we have more exceptions to copyright? After all, the Copyright Clause of the Constitution is meant to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," i.e. spark new ideas and innovations. Perhaps we should even consider shortening the copyright term? What do YOU think?

Now that the potterdammerung surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has subsided, its publisher, Scholastic, has some debriefing to do. Despite some pretty extensive security, a bonafide copy of the book was released on the peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent several days before the book.

The leaked copy consisted of a digital photograph of every page of the much sought-after volume, a fact that may help Scholastic track down the culprit. Nonetheless, the event is making book publishers wonder if they, like the music recording industry, should worry about internet piracy. Their concerns may grow as the market for ebooks increases, as they may prove just as easy to copy as digital music files.

What do you think? As books are increasingly being digitized, should book publishers be worried about pirates?

As he did in Levitt and his 2005 book Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner poses yet another interesting question on the Freakonomics blog: "If public libraries didn’t exist, could you start one today?" The post actually produced so much interest that it crashed their site.

Dubner's basic contention is that book publishers would vehemently oppose creating public libraries today, if they didn't already exist. Their response would probably mirror the music recording industry's reaction to Napster and other such peer-to-peer filesharing sites. After all, libraries, with their booksharing tendencies, may very well contribute to lower sales for book publishers. According to NCES, libraries circulated over 2 billion items in 2004. Even if only a fraction of the people who check out books bought them, that's a big chunk of change.

So what do you think? In this age of copyright disputes, could we create public libraries if they weren't already around?