Last week I had the disturbing feeling that my work had been stolen. Everyone makes a big deal about music piracy, which is indeed a big issue (I just wrote an article about it for a teen web site, which was a pain to write since it seems like such a no-brainer issue; I then spent my entire weekend at Sonshine telling the teens not be thieves. It’s not a no-brainer issue.), but it’s not the only kind of piracy going on. Articles
I’m sorry that happened, Kevin. I’m sure these guys have no idea what it’s like to make a living on the ‘Net like you do. Not many people know what it’s like. I sure don’t, although I hope to some day.
Years ago, I wrote a humor piece, which I submitted to the Door, surmising what one of Paul’s epistles might have been like had e-mail been available. The Door passed, so I gave it away to a humor-piece-of-the-day e-mail list. I had long since forgotten about the piece until I ran across it a month or two ago, uncredited, on a web site. I did a Google search and found it was online at several locations — some of which gave me credit, and some of which didn’t. I wrote one web site owner; the fact he had no attribution at all, and the way the piece was displayed, made it almost seem as if he were taking credit.
Some people really have a hard time understanding intellectual policy rights. At the newspaper where I work, we sometimes have people bring in a clipping of a particular essay or bit of doggerel and insist that we publish it — and when I try to explain to them that we can’t, they get angry about it!
We do tribute supplements for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day where readers can write short pieces about their parents. One woman brought in a greeting card and wanted to submit the verse in it as her tribute to her father. I could not for the life of me get her to understand why I could not publish the greeting card poem.
Intellectual property rights. Did I say “intellectual policy rights”? I must have been asleep.