Annie Paul asked (on Twitter): "What are protocols for blog consolidators who use your posts without your name appearing along with your post?"
Nicholas Laughlin responded: "Copyright is copyright, and reproducing in full is not covered by fair use..."
And the exchange got me swearing up and down that I'll never again publish anyone's poem in its entirety (though I've always been careful to include names, titles, and links where possible). I've been informed that posting a poem in its entirety diminishes the value of the overall collection.
The exchange also made me think about this situation...
What if you logged on to your favourite social networking site one day and discovered the talk was all about a brilliant newspaper article, and when you checked out the article it closely resembled something you had written online a few months prior? Would you just brush it aside and consider it mere coincidence? Given that general scenario, a rational thinking person would probably do just that . . . brush it aside . . . call it mere coincidence. But what if there's more to the scenario?
Some may assume the internet is a vast global place where good and bad blog writing go off to die more or less anonymously, and where blogs and such are not as noticeable as established newspapers, magazines, journals, and the like. So what if one were to pinch from something one saw on a blog? Who'd care? Well, if the internet is as vast as some assume, then the pincher may well get away with such an act. But the truth is most of us who use the internet tend to visit and interact with the same sites and people regularly--the sites covering topics related to who we are and what we like to do. And of course that's how internet communities are created.
So back to the case I mentioned earlier. What if the writer of the "brilliant" article and you were part of such an internet community? What if the chances of him / her having read your article were highly likely?
I'm not writing this to attack anyone in particular, even though I've experienced the above situation. As startled as I was at the article's similarity to mine, I had to force myself to remember that similar ideas strike people all the time and though I may have said it first within our internet community, that may not necessarily mean the person deliberately stole my idea. It may have simply been a case of mild pinching.
But though I'm willing to be generous about the issue, copyright violation is still a troubling one on the internet. It may range from the kinder gentler unauthorized cross postings (where websites "host" your blog to add to their site's content FOR FREE) to instances of outright theft, where people use content from your blog without linking or attributing the source. Some people don't seem to think copyright laws governing offline publications apply to the internet.
The rules governing theft of offline material are pretty clear. If you take words verbatim (or in poorly disguised paraphrasing form) from some place else and pass them off as your own, you're plagiarizing, and the penalties could be pretty stiff. Folks have been fired from academia and from media jobs for plagiarism, and others have been publicly embarrassed and have had their offending work pulled from shelves by publishers and book sellers.
In academia, to avoid repeating someone else's thesis, one is required to do thorough research and acknowledge those who said something similar. The ultimate goal in much of academic writing is of course to say something new, and prove that it is new. But even they don't always accomplish the task of saying something new every time.
It would be unreasonable to expect anyone to say something new all the time. I certainly don't claim to always do so on this blog, but I do attribute my sources when I use them, and I expect anyone who borrows something I say here or over at Baiganchoka to kindly cite the source.
If we can't rely on folks to be honorable about citing internet sources, and about asking for permission to use content, then . . . well, let's just hope it doesn't get to this.
