eBay, Wikipedia, and the Future of the Footnote

Abstract

[...] observing the canons of fair use (an extremely hazy concept in legal circles) and being careful about citations are absolutely essential in avoiding litigation over the use of copyrighted material, especially because, according to current copyright laws, almost everything written in the last eighty to one hundred years is still under copyright protection.3 We thus are stuck with traditional footnoting and citation systems, not because they serve either our evolving historiographical assumptions or available digital research methods, but because they (may) save us from a lawsuit we cannot afford.