Re: [epub] What do you think of this?!

[Jack <jj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Jack <jj@workbench.net>

At 07:18 PM 8/30/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>From: "Angela Giles Klocke" <jaklocke@bellsouth.net>
>
>I have to comment on this one!
>
>I have seen this done and I think others find it okay, especially if they
>think they are helping you.  But sometimes I guess it is pure plagiarism or
>ignorance.  I fell into the "ignorance" category about two weeks ago when I
>copied the background of another's site.  Little did I know this was wrong.
>The site I copied was actually copied from someone else's and the original
>owner contacted me about it after she went to my site (confused yet!?).  I
>had no idea that it was illegal to take the background and place it on your
>own and I'm sure so many other people out here in Cyberspace don't realize
>it, either (especially when you have the tools that allow you to "save
>picture as".).  So perhaps someone copied your site out of ignorance.  At
>least I'd rather hope it would go that way instead out of being done out of
>pure malice.
>
>I'm sure it was quite unsettling, as it was for the person who's background
>I had.  I'd try to contact the person again, nicely, and ask them of their
>true intentions.  Maybe it's ignorance...

Finally a voice of reason...

I would guess that you folks whose first thought is to run off and find a 
lawyer have only been on the net maybe three or four years tops.  There was 
an entire culture here before the commercial folks moved in, that 
encouraged sharing of information.  If you copied someone's Web site, that 
was called "mirroring" it and it was considered a high compliment (of 
course, that would only be true in cases where you did not change it to 
make it appear as though it were *your* work).

Most backgrounds came from "background archives" and in the early days of 
the Web, many people copied backgrounds they liked from other people's 
pages.  Again, that just went with the territory.

Now I will admit that there is a line here.  For example, if you "mirrored" 
someone's site, but changed all references to their name to yours, that 
would be plagiarism.  By the way, the reason mirroring is encouraged is 
because it reduces traffic on the next.  Anyone who has ever used a site 
like Tucows (http://www.tucows.com/) realizes that if everyone tried to go 
to the same site, there would be a tremendous amount of congestion on the 
net there, so they have "mirror" sites all over the world.

In the last couple of years, more and more commercial businesses have moved 
onto the 'net, and have almost completely ignored the longstanding existing 
culture of the 'net, which encourages openness and sharing.  Some folks are 
as bad as Americans who go to another country and expect the locals to 
behave in the same way that we do.  It is rather presumptuous to simply 
expect those who have been on the 'net for a while to ignore longstanding 
traditions just because you've arrived with expectations formed in your own 
local culture (remember that the Internet is world-wide).

So what I am saying is, don't necessarily assume malice or evil intent 
until you have contacted the person and made your displeasure known.  And 
to avoid the problems in the future, consider putting a clear copyright 
statement on your site's front page, if you haven't already.  Most 
'netizens will respect that.

The other thing you should realize in that on the 'net, threats are 
cheap.  Anyone can threaten a lawsuit, and 99.9% of the time the person 
making the threat doesn't have the time, money, or resources to follow 
through on the threat (I'm talking about all threats of legal action ever 
made on the 'net here, such as those in Usenet newsgroups and the 
like.  Obviously this is not the case if you are CNN or MSNBC or Yahoo or 
somebody like that).  So sometimes a threat of legal action can have the 
opposite effect of what you've intended, and now you have painted yourself 
in a corner - you are almost forced to spend the money on a lawyer, and 
unless the other party lives in the same state you do, it probably won't be 
cheap.

So in the words of former president Teddy Roosevelt, "Speak softly but 
carry a big stick".  I would not advise making legal threats on the first 
contact (and that is doubly true if any of the content on your site is not 
totally original with you).  If you have to haul out the "big stick" 
(threat of legal action) later, you always can, but that would come after 
contacting the site owner and if that fails, the ISP hosting their 
site.  In both cases, a polite letter will probably get you a lot more 
mileage than a threatening one (ISP's in particular don't like being 
threatened).

Understand the culture of the 'net, and you can make it work to your 
advantage.  Disregard it, and it can turn on you and bite you in ways 
you'll never fully appreciate.  And by the way, none of this should be 
taken as saying that you should just put up with the copying of your site 
if it really bothers you, just that you should maybe start out with the 
assumption that no malice was intended until the other party proves otherwise.

One final thought, many of the folks who are new to the 'net do not come 
from a publishing background, and may be only vaguely aware that copyright 
laws even exist.  It is not the sort of thing that the normal person deals 
with in their day-to-day lives.  Then suddenly they get an Internet account 
and have the ability to put up a Web page, but they still have only a 
layman's understanding (which is to say, almost no understanding at all) 
about what's permissible and what isn't.  So you may need to gently educate 
them a bit!

Jack


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