• Business Week, Monday, July 23, 2007 10:48 AM

Was it really any surprise that the last installment of the Harry Potter series showed up on the Web prior to its July 21 release? Pictures of the book's text showed up on News Corp.'s Photobucket and the virtual community Gaia Online, threatening to ruin the ending for thousands of the series' fans.

A greater surprise is how quickly many Web sites responded to requests to take down the copyrighted material and hand over information about the perpetrators. In fact, on July 16, U.S. publisher Scholastic subpoenaed information about the identity of the violators on Gaia Online, which immediately supplied the requested information. Have the attitudes of publishers of user-generated content changed?

Of course, the legality of that point is open to debate. Google, for example, maintains that there's nothing illegal about allowing YouTube users to upload copyrighted material because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act states that purveyors of UGC sites need only take down protected content at the owner's request. Even so, YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace are doing their part to curb the proliferation of copyrighted material--a stance that is drastically different from two years ago.

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