Sadly I have to tell everyone that I do enforce the copyright on this website. Stealing of work on this site is theft and frankly unacceptable. 
Today a reader copied and pasted an entire blog post to another website not attributing it properly and called it fair use. That is not fair use. I do however encourage fair use of the content of this website as its the goal to provoke thought, conversation and new ideas that will benefit autistic people.
For everyones reference I have included a section on copyright enforcement and fair use. Please check it out.
I want everyone to understand that a lot of hard work and time goes into the creation of content for this site and stealing of the work on this site is not a good thing. I encourage conversation, criticism and everything else as long as its in the proper legal way.
Thanks for your understanding in this matter.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Against my better judgment, I will respond.
So you can quote word for word a post someone made on the site and comment about it but others don’t have this privilege when it happens to be your words? Fair use is everything about intent and nothing about amount of copyright borrowed unless the amount of copyright borrowed, and you have to prove actual damages in the end, and any damages created from this are of your own doing, it is after all your own opinion. It is your burden to prove the intent of the person quoting your work is to steal your work. It clearly isnt, it is about relaying their opinion and the opinion is specifically about your work. Trust me, you don’t have a leg to stand on, and I am finding your complaints rather amusing. You do know that you can be sued simply for threatening to sue people right? I would get used to people relaying your content and commenting negatively about it. You can post my comment on your page, and criticize the hell out of it, and I am the only one who can be held accountable for my own words.
If I had it my way I would have your blog post linked on the front page, an archive of the thread you whined about, your DMCA complaint attached with emails sent back and forth, and staff commentary throughout the whole thing. I make no guarantees that wont happen either. If you cant take the heat of criticism I suggest you stop blogging, because threatening people isn’t going to get you very far. Quotation while clearly stating attribution and providing a link is not theft of anything.
I don’t mind criticism, I encourage it. However copying of work in its entirety is not fair use and does threaten the value of said work. The staff of wrongplanet agreed and have removed it.
The burden is actually on the infringer to prove fair use. Copying of an entire work from a website to comment on it would be the same as me posting an entire video of a hit blockbuster on this website to make comments about it.
sorry I didnt edit the above correctly, I will repost:
Against my better judgment, I will respond.
So you can quote word for word a post someone made on the site and comment about it but others don’t have this privilege when it happens to be your words? Fair use is everything about intent and nothing about amount of copyright borrowed unless the amount of copyright borrowed is somehow evidence of actual intended theft (aka plagiarism) or simply used to relay free speech, and you have to prove actual damages in the end, and any damages created from this are of your own doing, it is after all your own opinion. It is your burden to prove the intent of the person quoting your work is to steal your work. It clearly isnt, it is about relaying their opinion and the opinion is specifically about your work. Trust me, you don’t have a leg to stand on, and I am finding your complaints rather amusing. You do know that you can be sued simply for threatening to sue people right? I would get used to people relaying your content and commenting negatively about it. You can post my comment on your page, and criticize the hell out of it, and I am the only one who can be held accountable for my own words.
If I had it my way I would have your blog post linked on the front page, an archive of the thread you whined about, your DMCA complaint attached with emails sent back and forth, and staff commentary throughout the whole thing. I make no guarantees that wont happen either. If you cant take the heat of criticism I suggest you stop blogging, because threatening people isn’t going to get you very far. Quotation while clearly stating attribution and providing a link is not theft of anything.
and no, it isnt the same, especially not when your post in it’s entirety is essential to relaying a specific message because it is so small, its not a novel, its a blog post. That and you still have to prove damages and intent to cause you damages. You freely distribute this. If anything you should be paying us for hosting you whining.
You should do some reading on case law. Intent does not need to be proven to violate copyright law. And blog posts are just as protected as feature films, novels or magazines.
Damages are quite easily proven in a case such as this. Copying internet content word for word lowers the ranking of the pages in search engine results and this decreases the value of the content.
you actually gain all sorts of SEO value from having your work outside of your own site and having a link embedded in where it is contained, loaded with all sorts of keywords that are great for you to have associated with your site from such a high traffic source, but whatever.
also, its called innocent until proven guilty for a reason. its your burden.
Copyright law is not criminal, its civil. And the burden is actually on the alleged violator to prove its fair use and that it did not cause loss of value.
My rights begin the second I hit publish and are assumed by the court and I don’t have to prove its my work. I just have to show a print off of the infringing material and that I requested it be removed. Its up to them to prove that its fair use, does not decrease the value of it, and that its not a significant portion of the work.
the burden shifts to defendent if and only if you can provide enough proof to convince a judge or jury its a valid argument. I dont think you even make it this far.
Wow…. the facts are right in front of your face and you still deny it. I don’t know what else to say.
so by your own definition your quoting of that user’s post on your blog is a copyright violation? If not, why not?
1. The user does not have a financial value on the post and has no way to make financial gain on it.
2. It was a communication that was publicly available and addressed to me – thus it meets implied licensing requirements.
the post was reinstated, and I will leave no further comments regarding the issue.