Copyright Infringement
Posted by Whitney Young Fri, 11 Nov 2005 03:16:00 GMT
Copyrights have been around for a long time. I think the first time I really had the idea behind the legal issues behind copyrights was when I was in sixth grade. It was when writing a paper for school. I doubt everyone is told about copyrights for papers in 6th grade, but I would assume that many if not most people learned about them during high-school. Why? Again, research papers.
Having to write countless bibliographies or works cited pages has gotten tedious through the years. It’s not that hard to do, though. It takes about ten seconds to find all of the information that you need from a book and write it down. The point? To give the author credit for the work. I’ve written a good number of things in my life, some of them might not be all that impressive, but they are my words, my thoughts put out there on paper (or online if you please). I have never filed with the US Copyright Office and registered any of my pieces of writing, but I don’t have all that much reason to. Technically my writings are copyrighted the second that they’re written. According to law, in fact, they are.
In addition, according to law, all you have to do to avoid copyright infringement is cite your source. (At least that’s what I learned in high-school… seems to be accurate, though, since textbooks cite their sources.) Doesn’t seem to hard to do, does it? I did a search today to look for sites that might be promoting Senuti. There are a good number. Some of them have some nice things to say. I was reading one that seemed fairly familiar, though. Familiar to the point that I thought I might have written it. Oh wait, I did. Interesting.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that, but it was the first time that I had continued to read and not seen one word that was not my own. In fact, there were self-references on the page that were references to me. That got me thinking, though. Are there other places online that do the same thing? Copy and paste? Answer: yes.
I did a Google search for “There are many good reasons that someone would have to transfer music”. It’s the first line on the features page for Senuti. Interestingly, Google turned up more than just my own website. In fact, many results were filtered out because the page content was so similar. After looking through the unfiltered results and opening many of the pages, I was amazed to find a good number of sites that used my words. Exactly my words.
A good number of them link to my site, which I guess to some extent lets people know where the information is coming from. The problem, though, is that I have the right to change my website at any time. If I do, and they keep their content the same, then no one knows that they were in fact my words. Copyright infringement? I think so. Illegal? Very.
The reason this upsets me so much is not because someone stole the content of what is on my website. It’s the fact that it is my work that I don’t particularly want someone else to have credit for. It’s more the fact that I have a lot of source code that is also copyrighted available for download on my website. (It’s under a license, too, which I’ll probably write about at a later date.) It is extremely easy to cite a source. It also will potentially save you a lot of hassle in the future.
The copyright at the bottom of this page means something. Please respect it.
