In time, last week may have been seen as the moment when many doors began to be shut and locked on the Internet. The Internet, this wonderful experiment in openness, must face the reality that it exists within a natural world where everything that is open is open to attack. There is no copyright on words, nor can there ever be. Dictionaries do not create language. Rather, they define and record it.
Nobody owns language.
The day some large organisation does, is the day that language begins to die. Copying bits costs approximately nothing. Creating bits costs approximately everything. The Priceline and Amazon lawsuits will be very closely watched indeed. Universities are increasingly facing problems with students violating copyrights, and some experts say students do not understand the issues surrounding intellectual property.