Artists and Copyright

According to MTV, Dr. Dre has lost a lawsuit filed over a presumably-uncleared sample on his last album (Dre still hopes to appeal). This is certainly not the first time that something like this has happened: in the mid-nineties, British band The Verve were forced to pay all royalties from their song Bittersweet Symphony (*and* alter song credits) after Allen Klein--who owns the rights to the 1960's Stones catalogue--discovered that the song used a sample from an orchestral recording of "The Last Time." Thing is, though, that many groups believe that such lawsuits shouldn't occur except in the most blatant circumstances; among these groups, Musicians Against the Copyrighting of Samples and the group Negativland are perhaps the most outspoken. Should samples be protected by copyright, or should artists/musicians have the right to manipulate the old into the new?

Is this the same Dr. Dre that is so pro-copyright for artists? Seems a bit ironic, eh?

"Publishing as Teachers: What's Stopping Us?"

On XPLANA Laura Gibbs writes:

Scholarship. Teachership. It is certainly indicative that the first word, scholarship, is a word that we probably have occasion to use every day of our professional lives. Yet even though we might also be involved in teaching activities every day as well, there is not an equivalent word - a word like "teachership", say - to help us think and talk about what we are doing.

Is blogging making us as Composition teachers less scholarly?