Kindle DX Extended Demo

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Elizabeth Gilbert on "A different way to think about creative genius" from TED

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On Blog Piracy

Imitation may make me blush in its sincere flattery, but wholesale theft of intellectual property only makes me flush with anger. In my naiveté (my previous blog had only been around for nine months), I had assumed that entries written for it might accrue some small readership and relationship between me, the writer, and you, the reader. Instead, those posts merely provided a regular source of income for a thief.

Here's a short history. In mid-April, 2009, I discovered through Wordpress ping-backs that a thief had subscribed through RSS to my blog, sucking my entries into his own. Innocently, I visited his site. It shocked me to see my own work displayed without attribution, but what disturbed me more was the advertising displayed to support the site. Worse, that site tried to install malware on my computer.

I contacted Wordpress, but since the offending site was hosted elsewhere, they wanted to but could not help. The web host insisted that I prove that the work was uniquely my own under penalty of perjury. Such a request offended me at first. I decided to close down the blog and begin anew, but not without first taking all the steps to prevent further piracy, including:

• Providing a clear copyright notice on the blog’s first page
• Restricting RSS feeds to title plus short, tantalizing blog post summaries
• Using CopyScape banners and notices
• Setting up Google alerts for my blog title and my name

And yet, after all the trouble I’ve gone to to prevent piracy, during the past days it’s occurred to me that in the end, there’s never enough protection when someone has become determined enough to steal. One must trust. It’s a foundational value. And so, a new beginning: The Author’s Way.

[If you’re interested in more on plagiarism, visit Plagiarism Today.]

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