A prime example of copyright misconceptions that can make you look foolish
Just in case some of you have not heard, a very interesting and amusing incident took place this week involving plagiarism of online content. Here is the short version: a renaissance enthusiast posted her recipes for authentic apple pies of the period to a web site that specializes in that sort of thing. Her recipes included introductions, colorfully written in Early Modern English. Later on, she found out that her entire recipes, word-for-word, had been copied into Cook Source magazine.
She contacted the magazine's editor and requested that $130 be paid to her alma matter, the Columbia School of Journalism; this was a goodwill gesture, requesting payment that would amount to $0.10/word. The editor wrote back, acknowledging that she copied the recipes, but added a zinger: everything on the Internet is public domain, and free to be copied without recourse of any kind; also, considering how badly written the original work was, the writer should pay her for editing it. She added in a few condescending lines about everything that she has to put up with from "young writers." A more thorough account of it is here:
http://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html
The fallout from this is already all over Facebook and Twitter. Some people allege that the same magazine has plagiarized recipes from everyone from Martha Stewart to Disney (!). Professional journalistic stories have been written about it in the Washington Post (
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/cooks_source_masters_new_recip.html), The Guardian (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/nov/04/cooks-source-copyright-complaint), and on MSNBC.com (
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_new...apple-pies-are-recipe-for-internet-hate-fest-).
I'll keep the pedantry here to a minimum.
The Internet, in one sense, can be considered to be a "domain" and it is open for use by the "public." That does not mean that content on it is "public domain." That term means "free of copyright protections." Online speech is still speech and copyright law applies to it in the same way that it applies to any other form of expression. The US Copyright Act even has clauses in it that specifically refer to the Internet. As for the editor's arrogance, I won't even go there. I will say that making a normative legal statement in public is not a good idea unless you are ready to cite the law line and verse because it is too easy for other people to prove you wrong if you are.
That having been said, there is not a lot that can be done to keep this sort of thing from happening, be it by someone who is merely misinformed or by someone who deliberately wants to steal something. One thing that can be done, however, is to make certain key phrases or sentences in your online work as distinctive and as memorable as possible. This way, you can search for your own work by searching for the phrase (for best results, contain it within quotation marks). This way, you will be able to find copies of your work online fairly easily. I discovered this trick when a writer sent us a story that had a very bizarre word in the first sentence; I googled the sentence and discovered the entire story on a fan fiction forum. (In all likelihood, the story was the original work of the author and not plagiarized, but seeing it already available for free online made us reluctant to publish it, especially since it was probably based on someone else's IP).
