I'm just curious why I see some of my articles popping up on other sites when I did not give permission for them to be put there? If you highlight and copy and paste the first sentence to one of my articles on google or yahoo -- or any article on UM in fact -- they pop up on other sites! Most of them are U.K. sites. Does UM have an understanding with these sites about the articles -- or are they being stolen and used inappropiately? My article pen name is Atlantis Rises.

Copyright infringement. I was a member of another forum not long ago and I found that some of the things I posted turned up on other forums as if the poster had written it themselves. I messaged the administrator and it was promptly removed.

I have found the same thing too, i have found some of my poetry on other sites that i did not put there or give permission to use. I'm actually thinking about watermarking my poems so if they do get "stolen" then they cant claim to be the writer. It makes me very angry to see this happening.

Always watermark your work . A simple © doesn't phase thieves.

A word with the site's administrator should settle things if you find any of your material reproduced on other forums without your consent. Always be aware, however, especially if you contribute poems, short stories, music lyrics and the like that you run the risk of having your work plagerized, so proper steps should be taken to protect them.

I'm going to move this thread to a more appropriate category.

*Just to clarify, contact the administor of the site your material has appeared on without your consent, not Saruman. Most site operators will respond to your request to have the material in question removed.

there was a major case of this on here a few years ago and saruman had to write an sql statement or something like that which deleted every single one of said copyrightsters posts on here

was quite a pain in the erse for him as i recall haha

It has been an ongoing problem...it is just too easy to cut and paste. People here wonder why we are sticklers for sourcing material and giving credit.... there is a good reason

We don't give permission to anyone else to copy our columnist articles, these are copyrighted to the columnist who wrote them and only they can give permission to have it posted elsewhere, I won't give someone else permission on their behalf.

I have actually seen a few of our columnist articles being featured on sites such as Coast to Coast AM, but they only publish the first couple of sentences and then link to the full article, which is beneficial as it sends more visitors to the article.

There is such a thing as "fair use" for republishing copyrighted material, this comes in to play when copying part of an article such as a news story for commenting or news reporting purposes, which is why members can do that on the forum and we can post news stories on the front page, but at the same time this only applies if a reasonable amount is copied - again this is why we chase people up who copy and paste massive articles in their entirety or don't include a source link.

If a site is only copying a small amount of an article and providing a source link then that's generally acceptable and usually beneficial, however if they are reproducing your entire articles or not providing any kind of source information then that's plagiarism and you definately have a case for requesting the material be taken down.

one thing i have noticed on other communities, posters put the following in their siggies-

"this post copyright © {name} {year} all rights reserved" this helps in case of a stolen article proving you are in fact the originator.

after the mil. copyright act, everything is considered copyrighted by the author as soon as it is put into readable form, but if you do not have it registered, it could be harder if legal action has to be taken

us copyright office http://www.copyright.gov/

Sure other people come here to "copy" and post articles and such on "their" sites all the time

I just did a quick google check, and NOBODY is stealing ANY of my posts

Meow Purr

I just did a quick google check, and NOBODY is stealing ANY of my posts

Meow Purr


Thier you go kitty

oh ya

Meow Purr

What does it mean water mark the poems?