Coordinator of the Librarians’ Index to the Internet.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for February 2002
This month’s column was prompted in part by a question posed to me by a Gentle Reader whose library has a very special patron who has copied the library’s Web site and posted it on his own server with derogatory information plastered all over it.
The question was, “What is and what is not legal on library premises?” But the answer is both broader and more pointed. My personal recommendation is bellicose but effective: If people rip off your stuff, take them to court and make sure they go up the river. Show no mercy and no hesitation. I want to hear whimpering when the sentence is read.
As an information professional, it’s your responsibility to do what you can to keep those miscreants from harming others. You need to do this not just on your own behalf, but on behalf of all the folks who are getting ripped off every day on the Web and may not always have the resources or awareness to fight back.
Content theft goes on much more than you realize (probably because most thieves don’t do you the courtesy of tipping you off that they’ve stolen your content). One very well-known example of site theft happened repeatedly to a Civil War site created by George Hoemann, assistant director for distance education and independent study at the University of Tennessee. Hoemann told me that the site had been stolen several times that he was aware of “and many more, I’m sure, that I’m not aware of.”
The site launched in February 1995 and the earliest known complete copying occurred in April of 1996. “The most egregious example of this type of copying occurred in 1998—right as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was being debated in Congress. The culprit? A lawyer!”
Quite often the content is modified just enough to disguise its origins, and often it is never updated (thieves being by definition too lazy to create content, anyway).
Hoemann opted for a slightly less pugilistic approach than hauling folks to court. First of all, he told the lawyer that he had been breaking the law and to cease and desist. Sometimes you may be able to smooth out a little “misunderstanding.”(“Excuse me—Was I supposed to pay for that peanut butter?”) However, the lawyer had posted his own poetry on his site with a large copyright symbol under it, so he clearly knew better (even if they didn’t cover that in law school). The lawyer never acknowledged he had done wrong, but after repeated requests he finally removed the content.
Or you could take the technical route. Aaron Dobbs, network services librarian for Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, used file permissions and other adroit technical sleight-of-hand to beat back people who were abusing copyright, such as a former lab proctor who “kept loaning and sharing MP3s on Napster on the proctor machine in our lab.” It’s a pragmatic approach that doesn’t stop people from misbehaving elsewhere but at least gets them out of your hair.
A few crime victims bet on the Net’s volatility. Nearly half of all Web sites disappear every year. University of California/Riverside librarian Steve Mitchell of the Infomine portal told me, “We once found a Russian site that had lifted all of Infomine’s content. No problemski was our thought . . . considering that the site had many inherent problems, such as Russians generally don’t speak English and access to Russian sites can be very slow, etc. And who would the UC sue anyway? Boris or Natasha?” And sure enough, Mitchell said, “The site went away shortly.”
You may even find a use for a stolen site, as Hoemann has: “I use it as an example when I teach about copyright violations on the Web.”
It’s important to have a policy in place that states quite clearly who owns the content. Yet I have to admit that such a policy would probably be ignored if not mocked by its intended audience, not unlike the sign in the produce section that says, “Don’t steal the apples.”
Also consider copyrighting your content. Copyright is inherent to intellectual property; if you wrote it, you (or the publisher you have an agreement with) own it. However, proactively filing for copyright makes it easier to prove you own the content should you end up in court.
Consider addressing basic copyright issues in a staff training session. Resources could include the simple pamphlet Copyright Basics from the U.S. Copyright Office; Brad Templeton’s “Ten Myths” Web site; and Copyright Resources on the Internet, an excellent Web site from the Groton Public Schools in Mystic, Connecticut.
For fingertip reference, I am fond of the copyright guidance in The Chicago Manual of Style. It was written for the paper-based world, but its clear-eyed guidance applies to all media. Training topics could include not only site theft but other copyright problems, such as the many lyric and poetry sites that reproduce large quantities of copyrighted material without permission.
Whatever you do, encourage librarians to think about it from the author’s point of view; as Hoemann observed, “Net users tend not to think about the viewpoint of those who do the creating.” The site you save could be your own!