It’s getting scary out there

Regular readers will know that the topic of copyright is my hobbyhorse.  Over the years we have emphasised and repeated the message that it’s a dangerous pastime to copy someone else’s work and claim it as your own.  Thankfully my message is being heard and I regularly receive questions to clarify what is and isn’t a breach of copyright.  But then I come across examples of blatant violation and, quite frankly it scares me.  Take this case in point...

I am always looking for new ideas in communication and my research takes me to many different places. I stumbled upon a website recently that looked like a great business with an excellent focus on educating their clients with a regular e-newsletter.  I clicked on the e-news link to catch up on their news.  Expecting to find a professional publication to match their web presence, what I saw concerned me greatly. 

Most of the content in their e-newsletter had been taken from newspapers.  I knew this because the name of a newspaper was shown at the commencement of each article.  I truly hoped that this was included to acknowledge the sources of the facts in the articles but I was curious so I Googled a line from one of the articles.  The newspaper article appeared as the first search result.  To my horror the entire article that was printed in the newsletter had been copied word for word from the newspaper mentioned. 

But it got worse...

A sick feeling crept into my stomach as I read further and realised that the name of the person this information was attributed to in the newspaper article had been removed, giving the impression that this information had come directly from this firm.

I wanted to help so I immediately sent an email to the firm warning them of their copyright breach.  They were entirely unaware that they had done anything wrong – in fact, they thought that mentioning the newspaper sources was sufficient to meet copyright requirements.  Thankfully they realised the dangers and rewrote the information in their own words. 

I hate having to continually harp on about copyright, but the internet has made it all too easy for people to steal in more ways than one.  Most of the time it’s not intentional but as we know with any law, ignorance is never blissful.  And the price being paid for breaching these laws is very high. 

Please don’t take the risk.