Respecting Copyrights Online, Part 2 - Brainstorms and Raves

In my previous post I stated that I had “no current plans” to divulge the person behind my copyright infringement example. Although this person removed the content, images, and HTML that he took without permission from my websitetips.com site (only after I took drastic measures), he continues to add new content to his weblog that is copyrighted from other websites. Today’s post is a follow-up to my previous post, Respecting Copyrights Online.

Addendum Monday evening, April 28, 2008: Since the copyrighted materials are now removed from his website, I’ve gone ahead and removed the person’s name and website references from this post. The original point was to bring attention to the fact that copyright infringement is a problem that we can indeed do something about and that we have every right to protect our copyrighted materials.

In terms of educational purposes and copyrights: while sharing information with students is great, I also feel it’s the responsibility of the teacher to teach students how to share information responsibly and properly by taking notice of and respecting copyrights, by quoting sources properly, and by only sharing permitted materials in ways the copyright owner allows - whether offline or online.

Like many of us learned in school, it’s often OK to quote a paragraph or two and credit the source. Quoting more than that typically requires permission from the copyright owner.

On the other hand, if you take an entire copyrighted article from a website, remove all the copyright information and author information, do not quote or credit your source, and post it on a public website, it could indeed look like you’ve broken copyright laws and are actually trying to pass it off as your own work. Whether or not your actual intention was to rip off someone else’s material or to innocently share materials with students as part of a college course, don’t be surprised if the copyright owner calls the whistle on you! It’s adding salt to the wound when you also “hotlink” to all the images on the copyright owner’s server and steal bandwidth, too.

So, as I mentioned above, sharing information is fantastic - I have several websites devoted to that, including this blog. Sharing information responsibly and properly, crediting sources, and respecting copyright laws are part of the deal, too.

For more information about copyrights, see my Website Tips' site section: The Legal Side of Web Sites: Copyright Information.

While I refuse to directly link to this person’s website, below is a list of the posts with their corresponding live source URLs. This information is as of 10:40 AM 3/12/2008, PDT. (Update April 28, 2008, evening: the listing below has the person’s name and text URLs removed, as explained above. The original copyright owner source links remain.)

So, What Now?

I sent the above list to the webhost’s legal counsel, and I’ve notified a couple of the above website owners. Maybe they don’t mind him using their content, but maybe they DO mind. I leave that up to them.

At any rate, I’m bringing this public to make others aware that you ought to check to make sure your copyrighted content is not being posted at other websites without your permission. Note that the person’s site above also hotlinks to the images on the original source servers, so he’s stealing bandwidth from all these sites, too.

Update Monday evening, April 28, 2008: As noted in the Addendum above, the copyrighted materials have been removed from the website in question. Therefore I’ve gone ahead and removed references to his name and the website URLs from this post.