Defeat Content Thieves

Sigh! I'd hoped the "plagiarism"/copy stealing might be over for a while, but when I happened into the Technorati listings for this blog, I found my post on searching yourself partially scraped (probably from the RSS feed) and posted at an ambiguous site aptly named "spiderspro.com". A spider is an automated computer program that crawls around web pages, seeking whom it can devour.

This blog-style website is new and maybe thrown together by an amateur. Its illogical blogroll leads to an endless train of identical blogs that lead to the same. Maybe the whole thing is automated. Anyhoo, it reminded me of this super article sent in from the folks at Virtual Hosting: Take it Back! 100 Tips to Defeat Content Thieves. Especially important is the section on what to do once you've found the jerks stealing your stuff "Going in for the kill".

I'll also be perusing the white paper for leads on preventing Google and Yahoo's image searchers from accessing the graphics on my website. I'm tired of seeing all the top hits being people looking to swipe others' art. I'd rather know what writing topics people are searching for when they come to A Writer's Edge. That way, I can better serve readers' needs.

Squeeze Copyright to Stifle Creativity

The Harry Potter brouhaha playing out in British courts threatens the "fair use" provision of copyright law, or so says New York Times business columnist, Joe Nocera, in A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity. In a tight nutshell, the case involves a website publisher who announced he was about to present a companion book (long a standard practice in the fiction world) for profit. The problem? The product for sale was to be a portion of the Harry Potter Lexicon, also very much for the profit of the publisher. Nocera claims the "fair use" portion of copyright law, "allows anyone to create something new based on someone else’s art."

Perhaps J. K. Rowling and the handlers of her empire don't think an encyclopedia of Harry Potter terminology is something new. After all, it was Rowling who created the Harry Potter world and everything therein. Nocera implies Rowling is suing because no one asked her permission (read: paid for a license or franchise) to produce this new book.


Really, how creative is it to list words and their uses in someone else's novel? Sounds more like a specialized form of editing to me, like indexing or preparing a glossary for a manuscript. Not exactly original work. Certainly nothing new. The information in the website itself comes from established sources.

I realize I'm arguing against my own forté, nonfiction. But I'm thinking like a fiction writer of a successful enterprise, wanting to keep creative control, as they say in the movie biz.

Fair Use and Copyright Infringement

Sarah Bird claims to be an attorney (I think--if that's what being a "former litigator" means). At the SEOmoz.org website, she offers a lengthy article on What's Fair About Fair Use? Defending a Copyright Infringement Claim. Fair use, of course, is kind of the flip side of copyright protection, and it's a most controversial part of the law. This is mainly because the law is vague (in my opinion) concerning what constitutes an allowable reproduction of copyrighted materials. Instead of citing a specific amount of material that can be used, the law requires certain conditions be met. Again, they are open to interpretation, usually by lawyers:

⇒ There are four factors to consider when determining whether you are illegally infringing someone’s copyright or merely employing fair use of the material:
→ The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is nor nonprofit educational purposes;
→ The nature of the copyrighted work.
→ The amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
→ The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The purpose of Bird's article, however, is not to help you protect your writing, but rather to help you with the "fair use" defense. If you recycle someone else's work, as we bloggers often do, and the author feels you've infringed on the copyright, understanding the fair use section of the Copyright Act may help you. Seems to me that a comprehensive understanding would benefit all writers, no matter on which side of the fence of fair use they sit.

How to Handle Content Theft

With the discovery that some $#@!&*** is displaying the RSS feeds of my entire posts, including the copyright notices, the following resource caught my attention: The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft : The Blog Herald. Jonathan Bailey expounds on the process to catch and punish copy crooks. Let's see how my project to rid the Internet of a scummy scoundrel stacks up:

Detection (I got mine in a Google Alert)
Preserve Evidence (oops! missed that)
Contact Plagiarist (could find no id)
Contact Advertisers (check)
Contact Host (double check)
Contact Search Engine (oy, too much effort!)

Bailey offers links to resources to help you in every stage. Of course, first you have to be aware if someone uses your content. Hint: I use Google Alerts with all forms of my name, the blog name, and its URL, including those with and without the "http://" and the "www." Women have an advantage in that their names are more varied than men's. Yet another good reason to use a real name or pseudonym you want recognized on the Internet, rather than use a silly screen name.

The procedure for notifying Microsoft (the offending site is on Window Live Spaces or whatever it's called--very confusing) was so precise and complex that I'm still not sure I performed it correctly. Problem is, the person who owns the space is scraping many others' feeds, using a feed feeder service. I contacted that company, too, because redisplaying that content without permission is a violation of a term of service.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your search engines!

More U.S. Copyright Fees

From the U.S. Copyright Office - Fee Adjustments: 2007:

Sometime between October 1, 2007, and January 1, 2008: The Office will charge a fee for contents titles listed on an application for a collection, for example, for the titles of songs contained on an album. The Office will include these titles in its public registration records to make them more comprehensive and more useful to those who search the records. A fee will be charged for each title: $1 for each contents title in an electronic filing: $3 for each contents title on a paper application.

So, while they've lowered the rate to register from $45 to $35 if you register electronically, they've added more fees for those who register collections. Pity the poor poets and song writers!

Copypright Right and Wrong

Despite the typo in the page title, I'd trust the information on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Warnings and Cautions for Writers--Coypright page. It was reviewed in April for broken links and corrections. The SFWA web page offers sections on Copyright Basics, To Register or Not?, Registration Services, Copyright Myths and Links (to other copyright resources). Copyright issues seem to be the top questions asked by new writers.

Get Writing Help from LEO

Have you met LEO? It's the Literacy Education Online part of The Write Place, the writing center of St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Start on the Welcome to LEO page of this very simply designed website with tons of information about writing. It's organized along the lines of "for this problem, click here", although it does also have an alphabetical catalog. A problem with any cataloging scheme is being able to divine the system the constructors used. If I don't understand how to punctuate compound sentences, do I look under "punctuation", "compound", "sentences", "clauses", "semi-colons", "commas" or what? You'll find a plethora of useful writing information at LEO, but if you copy it, please respect the website's copyright notices and include them in your material. They even provide a page about citations that tells you how to do so in APA and MLA styles.

Copyright and Public Domain

Cornell University online offers one of the most complete compilations of the confusing information about what works are in the public domain and how copyright works in Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. It's way to large to reproduce here, although offered under a Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved license of Attribution-NonCommercial License 2.5, and too complex to simplify. According to the information provided:

This chart was first published in Peter B. Hirtle, "Recent Changes To The Copyright Law: Copyright Term Extension," Archival Outlook, January/February 1999. This version is current as of 1 January 2007. ...

The chart is based in part on the previously referenced Laura N. Gasaway's chart, "When Works Pass Into the Public Domain," at <http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm>, and similar charts found in Marie C. Malaro, A Legal Primer On Managing Museum Collections (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998): 155-156.

Be sure to read the footnotes to be fully informed. It's also available in a .PDF version.