A misconception suffered by inexperienced publishers is that copyright is a matter of opinion. It is not.
The copyright holder gets to determine the conditions under which his material may be used by others. Autodesk, for example, enforces an onerous 60,000-character license along with charging high prices for its software; OpenOffice gives away its software free, but it also attaches a license that guides the conduct of users.
Written articles, such as on my blog, contain unwritten restrictions on use by others. The reason it is unwritten is that it is governed by law.
All it takes to reprint one of my articles is an email to request permission; I almost always agree. The reprint must be accompanied by a statement of permission. I have no pity on those too lazy to fire off even an email. (Reprints by commercial entities are priced at $250 each.)
There is just one exception: short extracts of text may be used without permission to prove a point in an original article, although credit must be given.
My tone of voice in the comments section of your blog was intentional, since too many others have an attitude similar to yours: the hard work of others is free for the copying'n pasting. It takes me up to an hour to write a single entry for my blog, combing research and rewrites. In the case of Owen Wengerd's article, it was he who first alerted me to your plagiarism, and requested my help in combating it.
Plagiarism is serious. Just last month, Germany's Minister of Defense (and touted next Chancellor of Germany) was forced to resign after someone determined his PhD thesis was nearly 100% plagiarized.
Erasing the offending articles from your blog was a good first move.
So, may be now you understand all copyright wars Autodesk? Nice moment for think are same, as Autodesk?
Posted by: Account Deleted | Apr 04, 2011 at 12:39 PM
No one seems to know what copyright means, sorry this happened to you.
Posted by: Kevin | Apr 04, 2011 at 01:22 PM
Plagiarism is bad, but so is apostrophe abuse.
Posted by: Steve Johnson | Apr 06, 2011 at 06:53 PM
Ralph, do you know of a site which makes such plagiarism public? Something like a list saying original - copy (authorized/not). Like you or Owen I find my writings on the net everywhere. Often on pages which pretend it to be their own, but not even having a person responsible listed. When I find such, I also try to educate them, with getting stranges replies. The best I got was a note that the copy was only intended as a backup in case I decided to take it off my site.
Posted by: Dietmar Rudolph | Apr 08, 2011 at 05:52 AM
Plagiarism and outright theft of entire copyrighted works annoys me as well. I've had to take moves against other blogs simply reprinting my entire blog with advertising around it. That's the part that gets me most. I post stuff for free, and then other people steal the free stuff and try to make money from it.
Of course the biggest part of the problem is the sense of entitlement coming from those who are touted as "the future of business and technology". They don't understand ownership or personal responsibility. It could be argued they don't even understand individualism, since most of what they do is en masse as a mob.
Posted by: Matt Lombard | Apr 08, 2011 at 07:52 AM