I’m glad you enjoy your paper. I hope it is a good one. I can safely say though, that you are part of a shrinking market. The statistics bear that out. Young readers get their news through the Internet. At the ripe old age of 41, I am between the two movements. Readers older than me still like newspapers but most readers younger than me get their news through other sources.

I enjoyed my local (Tucson) newspaper when I was in my teens, but today the newspaper is mostly advertisements and short news stories that have little to offer me that I don’t already pick up from the radio on the way to work. I don’t recall seeing an article in my local paper that ran over 1500 words in years. The only section with solid local reporting, sadly, is the sports section.

If I want financial analysis I read one of my many financial newsfeeds on my reader. There are some excellent financial bloggers. If I want political analysis (I rarely do) there are about ten million political blogs to read. If I want news (not even analysis) on science or technology, I pretty much HAVE to turn to the Internet because my local newspapers run a total of two pages a week on the topic.

In short, newspapers don’t provide what I need. I think it is that way for a lot of people.

The newspapers aren’t going out of business because of content theft. They are going out of business because their content stinks. Most of them recycle the same AP or Reuters wire articles. That may have worked when people only had the newspaper and the TV for news, but frankly it just makes them look dated now. Newspapers are only going to survive by becoming hyper-local. They need to concentrate on the city they are in. Local news is the ONLY reason left to buy a local newspaper, but the newspapers respond to declining revenue by cutting reporting and supporting staff and running more useless wire junk. I for one won’t miss newspapers when they are gone because they stopped being of any value years ago.

I may link back to it in the content of my entry and comment about it, take quotes from it.

Both are acceptable within the academic realm for further studies, investigation and discussion. I am simply transfering this into the digital world.

I take the quotes and acknowledge the author also, in case the site comes down and the link no longer works.

He wasn’t interested as he believed people would simply email them to all their friends, thus depriving him of income.

I told him I thought the risk of that was small compared to the potential upside, but he wasn’t convinced.

I buy tons of e-books, but I never pass on the PDFs. Being a writer myself it goes against the grain. But I wonder how many other people do.

I have no doubt that there are financial losses due to plagiarism, but job losses seem less likely. I’m sure there are some, but to assume 750,000 lost jobs (USA) would assume that if there were no plagiarism, there would be 750,000 more jobs available. Until the recent credit crisis, unemployment was quite low in our country, and many of the unemployed worked (or didn’t work actually) in job sectors that have little to do directly with intellectual property such as construction, education, retail etc. To think that there were 750,000 people who were unemployed due to intellectual property theft would assume there were 750,000 qualified workers who had no jobs due to this one factor.