During my usual blog reading time this morning, I ran across a pair of posts in which people were describing a less traditional kind of content theft.
In the first entry, the blogger talked about catching a plagiarist that swiped a list of things to do over a holiday weekend and another took 14-sentence a course outline for a class on how to speak Mandarin.
In both cases the value of the nicked content was next to nothing, both in terms of personal and commercial value, but also could have been trivially recreated by the plagiarists in little time and with almost no effort.
This begs two questions: Why would anyone risk their reputation to steal something that can so easily be created? And what, if anything, should be done about it?
These are tough questions with few, if any, answers.
Personal Experiences
Most of the plagiarism I have battled has revolved around poetry, essays and stories that I’ve posted on my literature site. These works have some commercial value as many are in my book, but they mostly just carry a great deal of personal and emotional weight, being very heart-felt words from very difficult parts of my life.
However, in fighting those battles, I’ve run across more than a few incidents of plagiarism petty theft. Over a dozen people have nicked portions of my site intro, where I explain what poetry means to me, others have taken large chunks of my bio and one memorable instance involved a plagiarist actually stealing my copyright policy, the page where I tell people the conditions under which they can reuse my work.
Though most of these cases were dealt with directly since the petty theft existed alongside more serious ones, at least a few put me in a conundrum: What should I do about them?
Mixed Emotions
In some regards, petty plagiarism theft is more of a crime than other forms of plagiarism. Stealing something that you have no need to steal and can trivially produce reflects poorly on one’s ethics. On the other hand though, one doesn’t want to invest the time and energy or risk controversy over something with little significance.
This has caused many copyright holders to, understandably, to ignore such small infringements. They want to move on to bigger cases and spend more time creating new works. Others, however, have dealt with such cases and many have spent a great deal of time doing so.
However, much of a person’s strategy for handling these cases depends on the amount of other kinds of plagiarism they face. Copyright holders with few plagiarism cases are much more likely to act on petty thefts than those with a large volume.
Despite that, there’s no hard and fast rule for how to approach these matters and, quite frankly, I’m equally lost when trying to come up with a policy.
Policy Decisions
Generally, I handle incidents of petty plagiarism if it is accompanied by other, more serious, cases. This works well since it’s trivial to add another line to an existing complaint. I also handle such matters if there is an easy means of resolving the issue (such as a reliable host or a good chance a cease and desist letter might work) or if I have reason to believe that the infringement, though minor, could cause confusion of ownership and damage my reputation, for example, if the work is prominently displayed.
But if the case is difficult, has little impact and is trivial in nature, I generally take a pass. I can respond to almost any plagiarism matter within fifteen minutes of discovery and, don’t want to skip out on handling multiple major cases just to deal with a single, minor one with a lot of complications. It doesn’t make sense.
Because, while plagiarism is plagiarism, copyright holders have to think about what is the best use of their time and, we only have so much time that we can spend protecting our works. Stopping plagiarism can not interfere with either the creation of new works or one’s personal life.
While that might mean sometimes letting minor cases of plagiarism slide,
Elf’s DH,
Let me lay out the scenario that happened a few months after I switched to the CC license.
I had a plagiarist that, while not taking direct credit for a series of works, left off all attribution. His site was dated 2001. I wrote him and received no reply and then wrote the host.
He argued to the host, after being contacted, that when he found the work, it was under a license that didn’t require attribution. I’m going to assume that it public domain license or something to the like. According to him, I was trying to retroactively demand attribution when I had previously allowed non attributed use.
His basic claim was that the CC license was a restriction, not a loosening and that I was trying to take away rights that I had previously granted. The old copyright policy, which at that point was still up due to sheer ignorance, proved otherwise.
It reminded me that people will do/say just about anything to avoid trouble. His logic, in addition to being provably wrong, was also fatally flawed and that’s why he lost his case. Since then though, I’ve been reluctant to take down the old policy. However, it will be gone shortly.
As for your three scenarios:
1) Correct.
2) Correct.
3) Agreed. One of the reasons I abandoned it and only loosely enforced the notification element.
Hope that clarifies things a bit. While there’s little arguing with your logic, sadly, the plagiarism battle rarely centers around logic.
After all, plagiarism itself isn’t logical…
Thank you again!
I’m not sure I get it. Securing rights to use a work is the responsibility of the one copying the work, not the one providing it (by default, the author has all rights to the work).
You can relicense your own work as many times as you want, even under mutually contradictory licenses. Mozilla’s source code, for example, is simultaneously licensed under three licenses that are only partially compatible GPL/LGPL/MPL and Qt, the KDE toolkit, is licensed under a free license (GPL) for free software and a non-free license for proprietary software.
Three points:
(1) Let’s say someone who copied your work without attribution or notification wanted to mend their ways. They could find that the work is now under a CC license, and use and distribute it under those terms, right? So, even if you found out about it first, there is no need to use the old copyright policy against them.
(2) Your old license is more restrictive than the CC license because it requires notification. Your new CC license is more restrictive than the old one in that it has an anti-DRM provision. If someone DRM-ed your work before 2003 and you want to go after them, they could quote you back your copyright policy from the time, but only if they also abided by the remainder of the restrictions, in which case, they’re not plagiarists. Again, keeping around the old policy publically didn’t help you.
(3) Your old license required attribution and notification in the copied version, but did not require that the text of the license or a link to the *license* be preserved in any copy, or that the work be distributed under the same terms as it was acquired. So, it is quite possible that the notification and linking requirements may not be known to a copier who acquired the work from the first copier. That’s a basic flaw in your original license.
Elf's DH,
Let me lay out the scenario that happened a few months after I switched to the CC license.
I had a plagiarist that, while not taking direct credit for a series of works, left off all attribution. His site was dated 2001. I wrote him and received no reply and then wrote the host.
He argued to the host, after being contacted, that when he found the work, it was under a license that didn't require attribution. I'm going to assume that it public domain license or something to the like. According to him, I was trying to retroactively demand attribution when I had previously allowed non attributed use.
His basic claim was that the CC license was a restriction, not a loosening and that I was trying to take away rights that I had previously granted. The old copyright policy, which at that point was still up due to sheer ignorance, proved otherwise.
It reminded me that people will do/say just about anything to avoid trouble. His logic, in addition to being provably wrong, was also fatally flawed and that's why he lost his case. Since then though, I've been reluctant to take down the old policy. However, it will be gone shortly.
As for your three scenarios:
1) Correct.
2) Correct.
3) Agreed. One of the reasons I abandoned it and only loosely enforced the notification element.
Hope that clarifies things a bit. While there's little arguing with your logic, sadly, the plagiarism battle rarely centers around logic.
After all, plagiarism itself isn't logical…
Thank you again!
I'm not sure I get it. Securing rights to use a work is the responsibility of the one copying the work, not the one providing it (by default, the author has all rights to the work).
You can relicense your own work as many times as you want, even under mutually contradictory licenses. Mozilla's source code, for example, is simultaneously licensed under three licenses that are only partially compatible GPL/LGPL/MPL and Qt, the KDE toolkit, is licensed under a free license (GPL) for free software and a non-free license for proprietary software.
Three points:
(1) Let's say someone who copied your work without attribution or notification wanted to mend their ways. They could find that the work is now under a CC license, and use and distribute it under those terms, right? So, even if you found out about it first, there is no need to use the old copyright policy against them.
(2) Your old license is more restrictive than the CC license because it requires notification. Your new CC license is more restrictive than the old one in that it has an anti-DRM provision. If someone DRM-ed your work before 2003 and you want to go after them, they could quote you back your copyright policy from the time, but only if they also abided by the remainder of the restrictions, in which case, they're not plagiarists. Again, keeping around the old policy publically didn't help you.
(3) Your old license required attribution and notification in the copied version, but did not require that the text of the license or a link to the *license* be preserved in any copy, or that the work be distributed under the same terms as it was acquired. So, it is quite possible that the notification and linking requirements may not be known to a copier who acquired the work from the first copier. That's a basic flaw in your original license.
Elfs DH,
First off, you are completely correct. That was the policy that I used before I took to my CC license. When I started using it, I made it clear that the CC license usurped the old one in any areas that there was a disagreement, namely the notification element. I left the old policy up for the benefit of plagiarists that had started infringing before the CC license took effect, namely early 2003.
However, I’m probably going to go back and change out the license for just the CC one and relegate that to a non-public page of the site.
I should have done it a while ago but every time I would get ready to I would run across an ancient plagiarist that had at least some of their plagiarism fall under the old policy. Even now I’m turning up acts from 2001 and before.
Still, thank you for bringing this to my attention, I’ll correct it tomorrow…
Elfs DH,
First off, you are completely correct. That was the policy that I used before I took to my CC license. When I started using it, I made it clear that the CC license usurped the old one in any areas that there was a disagreement, namely the notification element. I left the old policy up for the benefit of plagiarists that had started infringing before the CC license took effect, namely early 2003.
However, I'm probably going to go back and change out the license for just the CC one and relegate that to a non-public page of the site.
I should have done it a while ago but every time I would get ready to I would run across an ancient plagiarist that had at least some of their plagiarism fall under the old policy. Even now I'm turning up acts from 2001 and before.
Still, thank you for bringing this to my attention, I'll correct it tomorrow…
Not directly related, but, the copyright policy you reference on your Raven’s Rants site appears to add additional terms to the other copyright license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5). Condition #1 is almost identical to the NC condition, and 3, and 4 specify your preferred form of attribution (without which the CC license makes little sense). Condition #2 (the notification requirement) seems to contradict the purpose of the CC license: that anyone be able to freely redistribute the work without notification, under the specified conditions.