Your Content or Your Life

Discussion in 'Content Management' started by jkomp, Dec 6, 2005.

  1. #1
    I am sure that there are many website owners out there that would be more than willing to do everything short of sacrificing their lives to protect their content, from those that would like to directly lift things from their pages. This is quite understandable. It hardly seems fair that we should work really hard, labouriously researching every detail to create a fantasticly useful website and then for someone to just take it as their own.

    However, this is the nature of the World Wide Web, it is the information highway, everything there is there to be shared. I have seen people try all sorts of tricks and devices too stop people copying their work, the most popular being disabling right click. But, if people can see your content, they can copy your content, it is a simple fact.

    If we want to share our website with the world, this is the chance we take, we are after all sharing it with everyone; the honest, the not so honest and the totally dishonest. So what are our options if we catch someone that has copied our content? Well, there are two main avenues of redress:

    1)Spend all your promotion budget on a legal team and do everything you can to seek legal recompense.
    2)Point out the similarities to the other website owner, take it as a bit of flattery and ask nicely for a creditation and a link back to your site.

    'Humans... evolutionary parrots'

    Why are humans such a successful species? Why aren't kindly dolphins or chimps ruling the world? It is, at least in part, because of our superior mimicking skills. Humans are indeed evolutionary parrots, making a living out of precisely copying the actions of others.

    This very factor helped the spread of tools and in more modern times the spread of technology. So if you really have something that you absolutely do not want others to copy, my best advice to you is to not put it on the web, because you have little hope of getting people to change their instinctive behaviour.


    Article by Thomas Jenkins of www.QueryCube.com

    P.S. Irony of all ironies, even this article has been copied and used without permission by others lol
     
    jkomp, Dec 6, 2005 IP