- Joined
- Dec 31, 2015
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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.
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.