Cyber-Plagiarism for Sale!: The Growing Problem of Blatant Copyright Infringement in Online Digital Media Stores

Abstract

While much ink and rhetoric have been spilled over cyber-piracy, there has been little mention of the problem of what we shall call 'cyber-plagiarism': thieves copying completely the works of others and selling them on online digital media stores like Apple’s App Store and Amazon’s Kindle Store. Because the current state of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not properly address cyber-plagiarism and digital media stores, this article suggests a new safe harbor to be added to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that is fair both to the legitimate authors and to digital media store operators. The proposed safe harbor would clarify many of the ambiguities of the current § 512(c) safe harbor for “Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users”; it would place slightly more stringent duties on digital media store operators, in return for significantly limiting the amount of damages for which the operators would be liable under secondary copyright liability.

Keywords: copyright, E-Commerce, digital millennium copyright act