A lesson in Theft versus Sharing

You may have, or may not have, notice the little CC logo on the right hand side bar, it is a creative common "license" and it has very specific conditions (you can click on the logo below to see the conditions). I have choosen to use the creative commons approach because I believe that grown up people should share ideas and not get bogged down in legalistic conditions that end up only benefiting the managers & agents, not the artists. The internet and its various sites and communities are a wonderful way to display your work and share your knowledge for the greater good. But the interweb utopia is being spoilt.

I think those that blindly cut and paste blog posts (even with a link back to my site, to fullfil the attribution aspect of CC) and use that as content to draw users and get "click through" revenue are just being lazy. It is plagarism pure and simple. At best they are not contributing anything, just wasting bandwidth and everyone's time, at worst they are yet another examples of the rot that is setting in as people try to monetize Web 2.0 (I am starting to translate that particular phrase into sucking the blood out of the true content providers). If you realized you have arrive here after seeing my work in such a site, please understand that you should stop viewing that website and definetly remove any RSS subscription to it.

To find copy & paste plagiarist is not that hard you can type in a characteristic phrase from your blog (especially one that may have contained an unfortunate spelling mistake or typo) to your favourite search engine, or use a service like copyscape (is free)

PS:: Mr Daniel Mendes (with the made up address and probably name as well). CEASE & DESIST :: YOU ARE SPECIFICALLY FORBIDDEN FROM EVER COPYING ANY OF MY WORK AGAIN.

Wandering in the Light by
Norm Hanson is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

The really dissapointing part of all this is in the fine print, and how much support google are going to provide. Oh that's right they are paying the plagiarists for doing it!