On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 cosponsors—including three Republicans—and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I—well, not I, but someone who can sew—can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.

Allan Schwartz, founder and lead designer of the label ABS, has already promised to do exactly that. He’ll take the dress, remake it, and sell it to the masses for much cheaper. Is he stealing? Or is he popularizing? Schumer’s legislation suggests his answer: he wants to make Schwartz’s imitation illegal. Only Vera Wang should be able to profit from her designs, at least for the first three years (the length of Schumer’s proposed copyright). But what if he’s wrong? What if copying, despite what your teacher always told you, is … good?

» via Newsweek

By this fall, readers who pick up their local newspapers in Richmond or Tampa will be seeing articles that have been edited and laid out by people more than 700 miles away.

Media General, owner of a chain of Southern newspapers, said last week that it would consolidate the copy-editing and page design for its three biggest papers, The Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia, The Tampa Tribune in Florida and The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina. It is already in the process of combining those functions for many of its smaller papers.

As it struggles to cut costs, much of the industry has explored centralized editing and layout operations for far-flung papers, but few publishers have gone nearly as far as Media General, whose properties are concentrated in Virginia and the Carolinas. The company has set up copy-editing and design centers for most of its papers in Lynchburg, Va., and Hickory, N.C.; for the three large papers, it will divide those operations between Tampa and Richmond. None will be done in Winston-Salem.

» via The New York Times