At SF/F publisher Tor's blog, Mur Lafferty briefly describes Neil Gaiman's and Cory Doctorow's WorldCon appearance where they share their experiences with giving away digital copies of their works as both a Nice Thing and a strategy for increasing sales. Neil Gaiman was the guest of honor at WorldCon. As noted previously on this blog, Doctorow is on the leading edge of digital rights philosophy and is well-known for sharing his work and seeing increased sales. Gaiman is now experimenting as well, and seeing positive results. (Being a Hugo/Nebula award winner might help, too.)

Here is the blog article on Gaiman and Doctorow at WorldCon.

The digital economy is a general term for Internet/Intranet-based commerce, but the forefront of the battle seems to be the entertainment business grappling with file sharing. Canada is struggling with digital rights (copyright) reform like many other nations are. They had a bit of embarrassment, though, when a paid report on copyright reform was alleged to have been plagiarized from another report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (a U.S.-based lobby group for the entertainment industry). According to Slashdot.org, there was some denial and then admissions about the claims. It was not U.S. lobby group that noticed the similarities of the reports, but a Canadian law professor at the University of Ottawa, Michael Geist.