*EDIT/ADD 9/19/20 – Since this theft was posted about here and on Ben’s blog, Mr. Hamson replied to Ben’s e-mail and removed the post from his site.*
Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22141 – 713:
Arrgh, Since tomorrow, 9/19/20, be International Talk Like A Pirate Day I thought ’twas ironic that I should find Piracy on the cyber-seas right down the stream from me. Many of you know that I administer what I call the mechanical part of my son’s blog, Brother’s Campfire. By that I mean I don’t ever touch his content or comments or anything, I just keep the domain registration up and update the nuts and bolts of the site. Of course, I follow it, too.
Now, it seems to be a fairly common practice on WordPress to “reblog” other people’s stuff. There may be times when this is appropriate or necessary but you need to get the owner’s permission. I was pretty surprised to find that someone had completely just stolen this post from Ben and put it on their seedy little website without permission and without so much as a link back to his site. Bad manners and criminal behavior, Mr. Pirate. He wouldn’t respond to e-mails so I hit his “reblog” button and left the note, “Since you stole this post without any sort of permission from the copyright holder I’m going to use you as an example of cyber-thievery.”
The turkey Jerky even had the brass to put his name to it as though it was his own work! I looked around his so-called blog and realized that most of his stuff is second-hand. His name is Ned Hamson and the post he stole, word-for-word from Brother’s Campfire is https://nedhamsonsecondlineviewofthenews.com/2020/09/15/working-hard-at-the-homefront/
Ben’s a grown man and can fight his own battles but this is something that has been a bone in my throat for a long time and I’m posting this because I know many of my followers know both of us and may or may not have heard about this. He and I also have different approaches to things.
I wrote about this sort of thing back in May, Plagiarism or Reblogged? What is Copyright Infringement? and recently discovered an article by an attorney about this subject on NOLO.com: Getting Permission to Publish: Ten Tips for Website Managers.
Comments
21 responses to “I Found This Entry Without A Link Back To The Owner – What To Do? Netiquette On The High Seas”
That’s a horrible thing to do.
Arrgghh. We be in agreement, matey!
Trying to pass off someone else’s content as your own is utterly unreasonable.
No back link or anything. Just copied and pasted the whole thing.
That’s the thing. It would be reasonable (in my mind) to say “this person said this thing”, quote them and link back to them. And we can have long discussions about how much is reasonable to quote.
But to just take someone’s content and try to pass it off as your own is so far over the line that there really is no justification for it.
And I agree with you. So-called “reblogging” is a big deal with WordPress but there’s still a right and wrong way to behave while doing it.
Plagiarism is not only unethical, under some circumstances it is considered theft of intellectual property–a crime.
Arrgghh! Ye be correct there Swabby!
Arrghhh.
Oh my!
Oh yeah
Yikes! ‘Wouldn’t want to be that person! People get sued for that all the time!
They do. He responded to Ben’s request by removing the post.
Ah-ha! It’s good he removed the post. But still, he knew better. Did he not think you’d catch him?
honestly I don’t know what the guy was thinking. He hasn’t got a lot of followers on any platform and his blog just seems to be reblogs of left-leaning blogs and news aritcles.
I guess he got desperate. Lol
Yes, reblogs are fairly common, however, they link to the author’s site, which I don’t see a problem with. In this situation, I know that was not the case. It’s good he removed stuff but did he apologize? Did he try to explain?
I’m not sure but I think he did.
I hate when people do that, that’s happened multiple times to me. If people ask I am okay, if people repost and give an explanation, even a simple gesture like ” I really like this post from A Prolific Potpourri and you will too”with due credit I am fine with that. I don’t want to have add my copyright notice to every post, but obviously theives never check your actual website where my copyright notice is posted. I have no problem doing what you did, calling someone out. Recently someone back linked my name only at the bottom of their post with no reasonable explanation, I asked them to kindly remove and they did.
Some are ignorant and some are just blatant thieves who don’t have an original thought in their head.
Yeah I’ve seen blogs like that of nothing but reposts.