Hy, A few days ago i hired someone to write me some articles about some open source software. Yesterday i receive his work, and start reading some of it. To my surprise i see that some of the info contained in the articles are taken "word by word" from sourceforge descriptions. Is this allowed? Is the sourceforge content under copyright? I mean if i look at a project from their site and copy+paste the project description(it is 1-2 sentenced) in my site, is this legal? Thanks.
Hi, The new copyright laws don't require filing a copyright, or even that you correctly provide date and name of the person producing the material to be copyrighted. It just is copyright protected. Now all you get for your $30 filling fee at the patent office is a 'presumption of validity' if you file it. However, your site can suffer from duplicate content, when a certain number of words are identical the indexers and search engines can detect it. So, even if the site you copy from is cool about it, you may not profit much from it. Be$t of luck!
All creations (USA anyway) are under copyright. I would check that source and see if there's any info about the ability to use the text. If there isn't then you are setting yourself up for problems. A better question is why did this "writer" pass off this copied text as original to you?
I honestly would say that this is not legal. I would ask them to redo the work or not pay them and find someone who's willing to do the work the right way for you.
If you paid for unique copy and it was copied, either way its dishonest and wrong. Lisa PearlyWrites.com
It sounds very much like your content writer plagiarized the content from another website; in short, they stole it and passed it off as their own creation. You should immediately contact them and ask for an explanation. Did you specify that you wanted original content in the instructions that you gave to the freelancer, or was it implied?
At the risk of being redundant...No, it's not allowed. Visit their terms of use <a href="http://sourceforge.net/tos/tos.php">Here</a> . Even if it were allowed, you would be doing yourself a huge disservice publishing dupe content on your site. Personally, I believe all webmasters buying "unique" articles should check to see if the content is duplicate on a regular basis. I would check immediately upon recieving the article, and then every month or so for at least a year. If you notice you site is getting dropped from search results, this could be the reason.
Whether is accepted or not, the fact is that goscript should claim a full refund because he paid for content writing, for content rewritten, nor copy and paste content.
marketjunction said in the US - this is also true in the UK, that it is possible to sue for copyrighted text even without applying for special copyright if you know what i mean. ....so its kind of a global protection your up against. dont copy - use original, or pay a professional.
It doesn't sound as if the entire piece was plagarized. If the copied material is one or two sentences, and the source is cited, does that make a difference? I could do that in a school paper, or a newspaper or magazine, I think. People copy things into posts all the time, citin the source. Wouldn't those be copyright violations. Of course the OP still has a problem in that the writer didn't cite the source or present it as a quote.
That's a joke, make sure you have digital rights to any content production you have outsourced. The guy has more or less screwed you by doing a copy and paste job. Good news is he won't make himself well known with that kind of crap. Colm