I’m in story mode for this one, so bear with me: So I’m looking through my RSS feeds (which usually takes some time since I have quite a few) and I come across this headline: “PICTURE …Some tattoos are just bad ideas?”, in the Digg Headlines feed, and I get excited because I recognize my title from this post, and I assume that I’ve finally made it on the front page of Digg (a big accomplishment in the blogging world, and something I’ve been trying to do for quite a while now).
I click over to find out more details, like who Dugg it, and what they said, and I’m somewhat shocked to find that it’s not a link to my site, but rather to a site called Fun Images (a Blogger blog).
It turns out that not only did Fun Images use my pic (which is fine, since I got the pic from Dethroner anyways), but they used my entire article, including the headline and the text.
Though I was somewhat placated by the fact that they did link to me as the original article, I was still upset by the fact that nowhere in the article did it indicate that those are my words and not theirs.
I’m pretty aware of this issue, as I always try to show when words are mine and when they’re someone else’s with quotes or block text or things like that, but on this site, nothing. No quotes, no block text, just an original article link.
Now part of the reason that I’m interested in this is that copying has come to my attention recently, which is why I’ve covered everything here in a Creative Commons license, but I’m just not sure what to make of this.
Should I be upset, keeping in mind the fact that I myself got the pic from somewhere else? Should I be content, considering the fact that I got a link and a somewhat obscured quote reference? Should I just ignore the whole thing and move on? What do you think?
I’m really interested to hear how people feel about this issue, so any opinions are greatly appreciated. Activate comment box.
Note: I’ve noticed that some of your comments are getting picked up by the Akismet Spam filter (which I usually just delete), so I apologize for any comments that might not have made it onto the site in the past, and I’ll make sure to check through the comments that get marked as spam in the future to make sure everything is where it should be. Thanks for your understanding.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Damn right you should be upset. Altough you don’t have copyright/ownership of the image, you do have it over yiour words, and that’s *your* artistic copyright. I would be livid if someone stole my writing (hence why I put it in Friends only blogs and stuff because at least then I can track what’s going on) but the problem is on the Internet, nothing is safe. I guess you have to accept there are some pretty unscruplous people in the world who will happily steal other’s work because they’re just not xclever enough or are too lazy to do it themselves.
There isn’t much you can realistically do about it (I don’t know whether you can contact the site etc, or if it’s even worth it) but you could always edit any future posts to say ‘this has been stolen’ if it happens again. Oh, and you could come up with a few false stories just to see if the theives are stupid enough to not do their research as well ;)
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