Software

A few times a year someone asks me to break copyright laws. From there I do my best to suggest getting the proper agreements to prevent having to make a court appearance.
Most of these requests come from people who see a site and really want a feature added to the site which in its self would be a money maker. The money is in the data mining of the data on the other persons company or site. Expect often if someone does not want their data to be copied a screen scrape is needed. This is where it gets tricky.

Here is a few links to copyright Myths and related info.

An article by Brad Templeton 10 Copyright myths

An article by Eric Sink Copyrights, Trademarks and patents

For Canadians, there is copyrightwatch.ca. This blog is supported by a team of academics, public interest advocates, and creators concerned that copyright serve the interests of ordinary Canadians. CopyrightWatch.ca

For real life example - Westjet vs Air Canada
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20040920_88645_88645
It ended up costing them 15 million...
http://www.cbc.ca/calgary/story/ca-westjet-settlement-20060529.html

AOL has made some fireworks with their release of search engine data. What they wanted to do with this data was provide something researchers could work with. The data its self only confirms what I have seen for many years in web logs. That is searches that are done are not very complex, which is why the power options like - / + really are not useful. Why build something no one is going to use ?

Other things that the data made me realize is there is lots of opportunity for keywords to be associated to a certain web site or brand.