From this week's Freakonomics: "I used 3,872 words of Winston Churchill’s in the book. And that cost me £950, which is roughly 40 cents a word."

A new contest is looking  to find a new song for birthdays -- one that's Creative Commons-licensed, so anyone could sing it for free.

Novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain promotes his idea for an American Authors Authority that would treat literature as "property." Though it never caught on at the time, Cain's plan offers insight on present-day debates about copyrights. 

On January 1, 2016 one of the most infamous books of the 20^th century, Mein Kampf, will go into the public domain and will be published in Germany for the first time in 70 years. German media professor Nikolaus Peifer explains to Bob how Germans are trying to manage and contextualize the book’s release in order to minimalize its impact.

A popular hip hop music site called Dajaz1 was recently returned to its owner after being seized by the federal government in November 2010. Despite RIAA assertions that the site had committed copyright infringement, the government handed the site back without any civil or criminal charges - and without much explanation. We turn to the "Copy Cat" - aka intellectual property attorney Jonathan Reichman - for answers.

Copyright made big headlines last week. File-sharing site Megaupload was shut down following a dramatic FBI raid. The Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) generated widespread web protests, resulting in a postponement of both bills. And the Supreme Court upheld a decision to restore copyright to works that previously had been part of the public domain - like Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf." We'll break down these convoluted stories with our go-to copyright expert, intellectual property lawyer Jon Reichman.

A March trial date was set Monday to decide whether the artist who created the Barack Obama "HOPE" image violated The Associated Press' copyright when he based the image on one of the news agency's pictures.

Both sides of the argument are right - where does that leave us?