People are stealing your stuff.
They are stealing your words and your pictures, your songs and your performances, and they are using them and even reselling them all over the Web.
Don’t believe me? Do a little vanity surfing… If you’ve got a body of work that has gotten out to the public, chances are that some of the public have appropriated it for their own uses. Google your name, and you might find your articles on websites that never paid you to post them. It happens all the time.
Sometimes, the intent is benevolent: They like your stuff, they give you credit, maybe they even link back to your blog, or link to your Amazon page, where people can buy your book. In many cases people don’t know that what they’re doing is against the law. Unfortunately, in some cases, they don’t care.
What do you do? Some see the exposure as good publicity, others see it as outright theft; In point of fact, it is sometimes both, and you have to decide: Is it worth the hassle to pursue the issue? Is the exposure worth something? How much time are you willing to spend chasing down people who steal your copyright? Some people try to go after every violation; Others only go after major companies who have deep pockets and should know better. Others don’t bother.
Sometimes the intent is not benevolent. Websites that plagiarize your work might copy it, or a part of it, without attribution, and try to pass it off as theirs. That’s just out and out stealing, but these kinds of thefts are harder to spot, because you have to be much more clever about how you search. Searching for key words, unique phrases, or combinations of topics, or whole strings of text are ways to find plagiarized copy.
Once you’ve found an instance of an unauthorized use, you have several options. You might write to the offender, explain that your property is YOUR property, and ask them to take your work off of their site. You could bill them for it. (Although this is usually unsuccessful, sometimes you’ll get a check in the mail, especially if you have registered the Copyright, which gives you strong legal protection.) You could threaten to sue them (although, again, in order to do so, you should have filed a Copyright for the work with the US Copyright office within 90 days of first publication, or BEFORE the infringement — more on Copyright in another post). You could write to the Website’s host and fill in their complaint form — if you can prove your ownership of the material, the site may be taken down.
Here are some resources to get started. I’ll cover copyright in more detail in future posts:
US copyright information from the Copyright office: www.copyright.gov
The text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which extends and clarifies Copyright protection of internet material: www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act
Google information on how to contact Google about a site that violates your copyright: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
For a whole different take on the issue, check out Creative Commons, which explains how creators can decide which rights they wish to retain, and which rights they are willing to give away: http://creativecommons.org/
Our American copyright laws are full of holes, and they don’t adequately protect ordinary creators. The ease of copying is having a huge effect on all aspects of the creative economy; it’s one reason why music stores are shutting and will soon be a thing of the past.
The important thing to remember is this: YOUR intellectual property is YOURS. If you want to take a Creative Commons License, fine. If you want to try to bill unauthorized users for their use of stolen material, go ahead. if you want to report a site under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, do that. if you want to shrug it off, you can do, too. But it’s well worth a couple of vanity surfs to check who’s using your stuff.
Karen,
A Google alert showed me that a blogger stole some of my content and inserted it randomly into a blog post. It seems to clear to me that the blogger’s trying to attract traffic from key word searchers.
I’ve sent a DMCA notice to the blogger’s host.
Have you ever sent a DMCA notice? What has been your experience?
Susan
No, I’ve never sent a DMCA notice. If I found something like you describe above, I certainly would. Some colleagues of mine in ASJA (www.ASJA.org; the American Society of Journalists and Authors) HAVE sent DMCA notices, and the offending posts wre deleted.
I HAVE sent direct notices to offenders, and told them that if they didn’t take down my stuff, I would send a DMCA notice. That has worked. There are a LOT of unauthorized uses of my stuff on the Net and I don’t have time to pursue all of them aggressively, so I tend to go after commercial enterprises and university sites, which should know better. If I’m REALLY procrastinating on a project, I might spend some time sending informative e-mnails about copyright to “lesser” offenders like an outdoors club telling them that they need to request permission if they want to have my stuff on their site. But honestly, I don’t have much time for that.
I was working with 2 people in their twenties to create a blog for one of my clients. They were talking about finding illustrations on the web, and I pointed out that that would be copyright violation. The response: “Oh, everybody does it. You use whatever you want and just take it down when someone complains.”
I think this is typical of a generational shift in attitude among people who grew up online. It may be a rising tide, and I don’t know how to counter it effectively. At the least it would require massive education.
Thanks for posting that, Stephanie: I think that we can do two things: Complain about it and work to educate people. I think this generational shift about ethics is not limited to the Internet, unfortunately, but the Interent has certainly magnified the problem. Thank you for posting!I’m going to return to this subject in future posts, including some discussions of fair use and the Internet.
Hi Karen,
I blogged about plagiarism about two weeks ago. It’s a widespread problem on the web because, as you say, it’s so easy to copy and paste and then not give credit where credit is due.
Another resource you can use to see if any material on your blog or website is being reproduced without your permission is http://www.copyscape.com.
Thanks for blogging about this. The more people who know about copyright, the better.
Gloria