My rant: My CC faux pas: Much ado about (almost) nothing.

Keobooks

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Maybe some people might disagree with me over this. But it's related to blogging, so I'm putting it here.

I am a bit frustrated right now. Due to my misreading a single word in someone's Creative Commons license, I got my butt royally chewed out by someone when it wasn't really neccasary. She was legally within her right to do what she did, but there was no need for her to use personal insults and threaten legal action over this.

I found an article giving advice to newbie bloggers that I found very interesting and useful. I liked it enough that I decided to quite from it in a blog article and talk about how I used the advice to evaluate my own page. Here are the steps I insured to make sure that the original source was attributed:

- At the top of the article, I used her full name and the full title of her article, with links to her site's home page and to the article I was quoting.

- Every time I quoted her material, I put it into a quote box, using italics and a diffent font to show that the writing was not my own. After each quoted passage, I put her full name at the end of the quote each and every time. Whenever I used her name, I highlighted it and linked back to the page I was referring to. I wanted to leave no ambiguity as to the source of the work.

I thought her license read that I could use 140 words instead of 140 characters before I had to ask permission before posting. I wrote her requesting permission at the same time I published, mostly out of courtesy. I wasn't used to dealing with a word limit, let alone a character limit. I'm not going to give my opinion about a 140 character limit, because she is within her right to do so.

I wasn't surprised not to hear from her for almost a week. But when I did hear from her, I was quite shocked by how nasty she was, when she had no reason to be. She wrote to me demanding that I take the piece down, and she said that I violated her CC license - which indeed I had - accidentally. Except for the 140 character limit, I followed it. I am aware that I violated it now, but her tone was if I had malicious intent.

I made it very clear that she was the author and I put her name and links several times in the piece. I linked to it more than her CC required. It doesn't nullify that I went over her character limit, but I think my intent was very clear that I wanted to give her full credit.

At the time I posted the article, my blog had less than 10 followers. The article in question had 3 views. One was hers and the other was mine on my husbands RSS feed. So this violation had leaked out to exactly one person.

Anyway, she sent me this nasty letter, telling me that I violated her CC. Then she complained that I sent her 4 emails about it. I checked. Two of my emails were simply requests to join her mailing lists and had nothing to do with the article. The second email had additional information I left out of the first message. Even if I did pester her four times and annoy her, it should have been clear that I was making sure to contact her about using her article.

She said that I posted without her permission, so I was required to take the article down. She can legally do this for any reason. I'm not contesting that, but her tone was if she discovered my violation on her own and I had made no effort at all to contact her and no effort to give her credit to her work.

To top it off, it looks like she copied the message to her lawyer. Really? I hope it was indeed her lawyer and she got charged for 15 minutes of billing time.

Everything she did was legal. I was outside the letter of the law and she had every right to refuse permission. There is also no law that says that you need to be civil, decent and reasonable when dealing with other people. There's no requirement to see that someone had no ill intent and was making a best effort to give credit.

It's just that she was so over the top about it. I don't see any reason to pull out all of your guns and get nasty about it. It just disgusted me. I would have given her a more elaborate apology had she shown any sign of common decency. Instead, I sent a single sentence which as pretty much. "Sorry. It's gone. Nobody saw it anyway." I figured any effort to explain myself cold lead to her scolding me further and threatening legal action or something. I just wanted to be done with it.

It soured me to blogging. It's soured me to communicate with anyone online anymore. I hate that there are people out there who will crap on your head simply because it's their legal right to do so. I look around and see people incorrectly quoting and not giving any credit at all to the sources on their blogs. It's wrong, but part of me thinks -- nobody seems to care or notice if you don't ask permission, and they dump vitriol on you if you do, why bother asking? Especially if you're blog is a week old and nobody reads it.

I'm sure I sound like a pouty little kid. You can go ahead and tell me. I don't care. I just had to post about it, and I didn't want to do it on my blog. Sorry to dump. I'm just ticked off. You can tell someone to take down a post without being a jack-hole about it. Just because you can legally act that way doesn't mean that you're required to act that way.
 

mccardey

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:Hug2: People are funny... It sounds like you did everything you could. #overreaction
 

Fruitbat

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Tell her to go f*** herself! :Sun:
 

mirandashell

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And she may have had this happen to her before and it didn't go so well which has soured her to people using her stuff.

That's no excuse for her being so rude and aggressive. Not at all. But you might be getting the backlash from another persons jackassery.

Best just to chalk it down to experience and move on.
 

kborsden

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It sounds like she went the route of Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) and determined her own gauge for fair usage in her exceptions and limitations to 140 characters. Does her blog get a lot of traffic?

I'd say read the following articles and don't burn your fingers again (or be made to feel like you are):
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-rule-copyright-material-30100.html
https://creativecommons.org/faq

To be honest, it's unlikely that much of her blog post was 100% original anyway. Especially if it was a help type entry or how-to for newbies. That said, maybe next time look at quoting from more than a single source (you'll find many blogs that cover similar ground on ANY subject). In particular, that first link on fair usage will armour you in future dealings.
 

Helix

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Read the CC licence carefully and then read it again. It's really aggravating when people lift your work for their own use, not least of all because it then becomes separated from the original CC licence. And remember that the original author/photographer can't know someone else's intent.
 

Keobooks

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I think when you link to your article, and your article has several links linking back to her article, it's fairly easy to read intent. Also, when someone writes and explicitly tells you exactly why they are quoting you, as I did, that's another not so subtle clue to someone's intent. I know you can still legally claim that you did not fully trust or comprehend someone's intent, but there's a point when you have a choice to act one way or another.

I have read the Creative Commons laws several times in the last week over this. I don't believe that I ever claimed that she was in the wrong. In fact, I said that she was within her rights. It's just that just that many times people blow things out of proportion and haul in their lawyers when it's not needed.
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I used to work at a university parking department. One of our meter readers would stand and wait for meters to run out and issue citations within 10 seconds of the expired flag popping up. I'm not kidding. We'd get these irate people showing their tickets. There was an electronic time stamp that would show the time that the meter expired and the time the ticket was issued. Many of them had less than ten seconds of time between the two events. People would say that this woman would watch people running to their cars and would wave her down and beg her not to ticket them, and she'd issue a ticket. A few times, she would put a ticket on the car when the person was inside the car and getting ready to pull out. They were still in the space while the meter expired, so they were in violation.

It was awful sitting at a desk a having people yell at you because this woman was hovering like a vulture over people's cars. You could read the student manual regarding the parking laws over several times and every time you would reach the conclusion that she was within her legal right to do this. And she would also feign ignorance and claim that she couldn't quite be sure that the person in their car was really intending to leave the lot seconds before they turned their ignition.

But none of the other meter readers did this. They weren't lax at all, but they would refrain from giving a ticket when someone was very obviously trying to get to their car less than a minute before the meter ran out. They wouldn't stalk the meters either. They'd e walk up and down, glancing at them. But there were usually at least 2 - 3 minutes between the meter running out and the citation being issued.

It's an annoyance to get a parking ticket. Especially these days when there is a timer that can show the exact time the meter expired and there's no way to get around the fact that you were in the space when you weren't supposed to be. Even if it was only 10 seconds, you don't have a legal leg to stand on. You were in the wrong.

Still it's frustrating as hell when you knew the person was standing around and waiting for that meter to tick down to 0. There's no law against being an ass-hat. And there's little more annoying than an ass-hat who is within their legal right to act like that.

She had her come-uppance, though. She got so offensive that she had several hundred complaints against her tactics in the year. Our manager tried to talk to her about being just slightly less eager to stalk the meters. She whipped out her handbook and showed that she was within her right to do this, and refused to stop. So our manager got fed up and read the handbook very carefully and got her suspended without pay over some ridiculously minor infraction. It was the only legal way to get her out of the department. And it was a shame that this woman was such a stickler that she had to be dealt with in this manner.
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I think it's sad that things sometimes have to come down to this level. My main complaint was that she was in the right, but really did not need to be so brutal. Just because it's within your right, doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do, if that makes sense. There's no reason to be an ass like that.

If it were a form letter that looked like she sent it out every time there was an infraction, it would be one thing. But this was hand crafted and snarky. Once again - she was within her right. She can legally claim that she did not know my intent even though I clearly stated it. That's her legal right.

I'm also in my legal right to whine about it. I've made no reference at all to her site, so it's not slander. It's not much different than someone who complains about getting a speeding ticket when they passed a speed trap. You have to pay the fine, but you can still bitch and moan that you were only going 5mph over the limit or whatever. It doesn't do any good other than to get it off your chest.
 
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Keobooks

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Oh I was the only one talking about slander. I am in one of my tangential moods, sorry. I just posted because I wanted to whine and moan. I don't think I do it often, but a few times a year, I seem to get a bug up my butt that won't crawl out until I stand on a soapbox.

I just want to be sure that nobody thinks I think she had no right to tell me to take the post down. She had a right. She didn't even have to be nice about it. A form letter would suffice. It just read as if she'd already contacted me several times before and I'd refused to comply several times. There's a time to get down and dirty, but you rarely have to open with it. If someone's ignored your neutral requests and warnings, I say go ahead and fire the big guns. But as a first contact?

I just think it's overkill. Especially considering that the content was obviously derivative. On a hunch based on what kbordsen posted here, I googled a few phrases from the work I quoted. I quickly pulled up quite a few articles not simply on the same topic, but each paragraph had the exact same points , but were worded differently. It's like several authors are just mashing up each other's work and pumping it out en masse. They are mixing up the words to avoid copyright violation, but it's clear that plagiarism and copyright are two very different creatures. I went into this venture believing they were nearly the same, and copious citations would suffice. I was wrong.


I think from now on when I find a piece like this I want to quote, I'll google a few phrases and see if it turns out to be one of these articles that is floating around and several different authors stirred it up just enough to legally call it theirs, I'll just write the general ideas I wanted to highlight and link the best written amalgamation of the work.

It's been educational, I must say.
 
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