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10:19:00 AM EDT
Hearing My daughter singing a nonsense song while she colors.
About Stealing
Got a question from a reader who asks of AOL Journals (and, I think, of blogs and online sites in general): This is nice, but how do you keep people from stealing the stuff you put online, like entries, or poetry and art?
A good question. The answer is: Short of suing someone for violating your copyright, you probably can't stop someone who is determined from stealing something you've placed online, either on a Journal or some other sort of Web site, if by stealing you mean taking the work you put up and representing it as his or her own.
BUT -- I don't know that this is something that most people have to be worried about. In my experience, most people don't want to steal stuff from you, they want to share what you've written with others. On journals and blogs, the accepted way to do this is by linking to the original source, and of course that what we encourage people to do here.
Sometimes people will cut and paste something they like and send it in an e-mail or post it on their personal site; I know that stuff that I've written has had that happen (use a search engine look up the phrases "AOL" and "Easter Bunny," and you'll see a piece I wrote, pasted on multiple Web sites). But even then, people typically attribute: Most of the people who have posted that essay above, for example, have kept my name on it.
In all the time I've been on the Web, there's only been one time where I've found someone who took something I wrote and passed it off as his, and interestingly, that person was caught on the plagarism not by me, but by someone else, who made the guy admit to the snatch. I've been online nearly a decade. So generally, I can say my experience with people "stealing" my stuff has been very low. And I write a lot. It's my job.
If there's something you absolutely don't want stolen, don't put it online. But for most people, having work stolen isn't much of a problem. Many, many more people want to see and share your stuff than to take credit for it.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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Stymie a thief and give your writings away. Equally entertaining is to cut and paste John's writings, sign his name to them and then give them away. Forcing the thief to take them is ok too.
8/26/03 9:35 PM
That's one idea. But as I said, actual theft doesn't really seem to be much of an issue. Most people simply aren't thieves.