Favorite Kind of Chart

A reader named Tim pointed me to this, thought I’d find it worthwhile. I did, so I’m sharing it with my readership.

see more Funny Graphs

Plagiarism & Copyright Infringement

A colleague named Jimmy has had many of his blog entries scraped and republished by scumbags on the internet. He has resorted to blocking the violating sites, sending emails, and finally went with cease-and-desist letters. I’m pleased to hear that several of the violations have been addressed, and a couple more domains are to be shut down if they don’t comply within a couple more days. If the domains and hosts are in the US, chances are good that things will clear up. Probably the same in Europe. I’m not so sure about other places.

I’ve had one or two pages reposted, but it hasn’t been too bad. Usually all it takes is an email to the offender, and they realize that posting an entire article is a violation, and they remove the content that they’ve inappropriated. (Hmmm, I don’t think “inappropriated” is a word, but it should be: “appropriated inappropriately”). The worst offender I’d ever encountered was About.com, where a couple of my pages were still in violation for over a year and they ignored my correspondences, before the pages disappeared one day without any acknowledgment.

I went to Copyscape.com and did a few searches. I was surprised to find quite a few pieces of my work reposted without my permission or even my knowledge. I sent out a few emails, and recorded some information for further action if needed.

Amazon.com runs a question-and-answer service called AskVillage. One individual had reposted a handful of my pages, so I sent of an email. Then I found some information about blocking sites and preventing hotlinking (when other sites point to images on my site, siphoning away my bandwidth). I set up a hotlink blocker that replaced my images with a bright warning. By the time I tested the AskVillage pages for this hitlink blocker, I was amazed to find out that the offending pages were already gone.

Amazon takes copyrights seriously. Other hosting services are not as attentive as Amazon, but at least I’ve received a few autoresponses.

There are a lot of sources for hotlink remediation, but the most comprehensive one that I ran across is the Ultimate Hotlink Protection page on Perishable Press. This page not only shows you inscrutable htaccess codes, it makes an attempt to explain what they mean and how they work. I’ve taken a different approach than most people with my blocking. Whereas most people only unblock their own site and one or two others, I don’t block anyone until they’ve violated my rights. This way, if someone hotlinks one or two images in a blog post, I’m not hosing them.

Here’s the image I serve in lieu of the image being hotlinked. Some folks leave a nasty message, or slip in some porn or something, but I thought this sends a bold enough message.

What Constitutes Copyright Infringement?

I’m not a legal expert, but my corporate lawyer specializes in intellectual property issues, and I’ve done some independent reading on the topic. The following is my opinion on what constitutes violation of my copyright.

All of my web pages and blog entries have a copyright notice. My blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. That means that if you want to take parts of my work and repost them or modify them, it’s okay as long as you attribute it to me, and you don’t use it for commercial purposes. This makes sense for a blog, because often someone posts something, then three or four people post their opinions or develop the idea further, and a regular discussion takes place. Also the blogosphere runs on material being distributed around, through RSS feeds and social snippet linking, so the rules and expectations are a little different. A lot of blogs have ads in the sidebars, but I won’t count that as a commercial use of my content.

My web site adheres to tighter standard. It’s based more on pure information and instruction and less on opinion and discussion. In the footer it says “All rights reserved”. That means it’s up to me to decide who can use my material and in what ways. The “Fair Use” doctrine says that small sections of my content can be reused for purposes of critical review, and I’m cool with that. It means someone can say “Listen to what that dope Peltier said!” then show a few sentences, and comment on them. And if someone wants to post a paragraph or illustration of mine as a way of leading readers to my pages, then I’m fine with that.

What is not cool is when somebody copies a whole page of mine, and posts it on their web site. Usually there is no attribution at all, but even if there is, it is a violation of my copyright. According to the law, the right to decide how my material is copied and distributed is mine, not some joker’s who is looking for content because he’s too stupid or illiterate to come up with anything on his own.

In a way, it’s a;most stupider when someone answers a forum question by filling a post with a long web page. Why not just type “Peltier says” and then include a link? It’s less typing, and the reader can go straight to the source and be certain that the complete answer is available. The reader can also browse around the rest of my site and probably find additional information. Plus I get the page views. I wrote the stuff, so I earned the web stats.

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