Daniel Harms wrote:
>Actually, it could. The amount reproduced is only one of the four
>criteria used to judge whether a document falls within fair use
>guidelines, and it's not the one given greatest priority (market
>impact). There are instances in which quoting an entire document would
>be perfectly legitimate for scholarly purposes - the one that comes
>immediately to mind is the first telegraph message (though that's public
>domain, of course). On the other hand, quoting even a small segment of
>a work could be infringement if that segment vitiates the market value
>of the work, for instance.
>
>
>
I didn't know about the market value aspect. That is really good to
know. One of the reasons why I have gotten so angry with people copying
the writing on my site is because it can cause a duplicate content
penalty with Google for that page of my site, which is a commercial
site. This means my ranking for that page plummets from among the top 10
or 20 results to typically #950. Then I have to track down who copied,
get them to take it down, wait for Google to recrawl that page, and then
hope the page will return in the Google rankings. It's a pain. I think I
will put a short version of this Fair Use thing up on my site.
When I put "classes" in quotation marks, I meant people who are running
what they call classes from a web site or a discussion group. These
usually have pretty much nothing in common with education, teaching, or
even just discussion. Instead, they are about writing and knowledge as
commodities, as possessions that people use to prove to they are grade-A
crones or certified witches or whatever and that "students" can stuff in
their Book of Shadows, never to be referred to again, but simply to be
possessed as a bona fide. If the teachers of these classes knew
anything, they would not have to copy my site and say they wrote it.
They could just link to my site as one source of info, but instead they
cut and paste and pretend they have written it themselves. I have to
waste a lot of time policing.
I hate to say it, but IME, this kind of thing is rife in the occult
community. Many people apparently want to say they are knowledgeable
about some aspect of magic, but they don't want to actually do the work
of learning or of writing up what they supposedly know. People not only
just rip others off but simply pull stuff out of their behind and put it
out there as knowledge from The Ancestors or some half-baked dreck. It's
embarrassing. And I say this as someone who is a part of this community.
I'll stop carping now.
Harry Roth
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