Last week, Charlene Davis (my friend, colleague, and
occasional co-author) joined a Yahoo! Group called Clever Homemaker. The group
has 6,000+ members and Charlene thought the articles the list owner was posting
about business were very well-written. Then she recognized one of the articles — it
was actually excerpt from one of my books on starting a business.
Charlene started doing some research and quickly discovered
more than 100 times that Shirley, the list owner, had lifted articles from
Entrepreneur.com; had copied entire web pages from other sites; and had taken
articles from free article directories such as ezinearticles.com – all without
the proper byline, author bio, author contact information, or any other
attribution. Apparently Shirley is claiming that what she is doing is "fair use" under the copyright law — but it is not, it's theft.
At first, Charlene thought maybe Shirley was just ignorant
and didn’t realize that what she is doing is copyright infringement and is
both illegal and immoral. So Charlene notified Shirley of that fact – and Shirley
promptly removed Charlene from the list.
Charlene’s next step was to notify Yahoo! of Shirley’s
violation of its terms and conditions. Yahoo! essentially blew Charlene off
with a form e-mail suggesting that each author deal with Shirley individually.
I’m sure most of the ripped-off authors are like me – we wouldn’t
have realized this was going on if Charlene hadn’t discovered it. Yahoo! has a
responsibility to police its groups and not make it easy for its users to
engage in intellectual property theft.
I’m still considering what my next step will be. I’ll let
you know.
Jacquelyn's latest book is Christian Business Almanac: The Ultimate Daily Guide for Kingdom-Driven Entrepreneurs and Leaders.
She is the author of the nonfiction books Simple Facts About Self-Publishing (Second Edition), Words to Work By: 31 devotions for the workplace based on the Book of Proverbs and Finding Joy in the Morning: You can make it through the night as well as the novel Choices (A Joyful Cup Story). With her husband, she is the co-creator of several coloring books for adults and the novelty My Book About series.
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I know that list. I was kicked off for complaining about the same thing. The listowner is quite a piece of work. I hope you are able to get justice!
Thanks. The sad part of this is that there is plenty of free quality content out there she could use without anyone complaining if she would just give the authors proper credit and links.
Charlene has also notified the top legal guy at Entrepreneur.com (she stole a bunch of material from them), and they have the resources that individual writers don’t have to take action.
I went to look for the group and yahoogroups tells me that “no group exists.” Maybe something — or someone — finally got to her?
Yahoo! took the list down. Yahoo! should be congratulated for taking the copyright infringement complaint seriously and acting on it promptly.
I pull info from places too, off the internet, or excerpts from books. I don’t ask permission but I do list that the info came from so and so book by so and so author or from whatever issue of whatever magazine or whatever webpage it came from. Just wondering if that is okay if I post where it came from?
The answer is it depends on where you’re getting the information, how much you’re using, and what copyrights the owner is asserting. I’m not an attorney, but my understanding is that in general, short quotes and book excerpts of less than 750 words used with attribution are acceptable under the Fair Use provision of the copyright law.
When you republish articles that you find on free article sites such as ezinearticles.com, you may use them in their entirety according to the terms of the site — just don’t edit, and be sure you include the author credit and links so that readers can reach the author if they want to. But before you republish anything from a website, check that site’s copyright notice, terms of service and/or check with the copyright owner.
For more of my thoughts on this issue, please read my latest post: http://www.jacquelynlynnblog.com/2010/08/copyright-infringement-is-theft-period.html
Thats too bad it’s gone. I was looking for it, and noticed your article in google search for “clever homemaker.” It was a very helpful site and I assumed the info came from other sources, because there was just so much. It’s just a shame. I agree with giving credit, but I’m just wondering, if in order to provide a service to her site, that it was easier to just copy/paste as she found things. I really don’t see the big issue. I need homemaker help as a new mom. I would never find all the info she gathered on my own. I couldn’t even keep up with all of it.
Tori, thank you for your comment. But I have a question for you. To continue with the analogy I introduced in http://www.jacquelynlynnblog.com/2010/08/copyright-infringement-is-theft-period.html : Are you saying that someone could break into your house, steal your belongings, and give them to someone who just doesn’t have time to shop, and that would be okay?
The owner of the Clever Homemaker list stole from me and many others. You may not think that’s a “big issue,” but I do.
The owner of the Clever Homemaker list had been told more than once that what she was doing was theft of intellectual property, and her response was to kick those people off the list.
There were ways she could have shared this information with you legally, ethically, and morally, but she chose to steal it and deny credit and income to the real authors who worked hard to create the material. She could, for example, have posted links to the sites from which she was stealing articles and let you go to those sites yourself to read the material—but she didn’t.
Entrepreneur.com (http://www.entrepreneur.com ) publishes excerpts of books on their site with the idea that at least some of the people who read them might then buy the entire book. Entrepreneur Press is in business to sell books and if they don’t sell books, they won’t be in business for long. The owner of the Clever Homemaker list repeatedly published excerpts from one of my books lifted from Entrepreneur.com without any sort of attribution or permission. By stealing this material, she denied almost 7,000 people (the number of subscribers to her list) the opportunity to know where that information really came from so they could buy the book if they want it.