Flutterby™! : copywrong? 2006-01-14 20:03:11.978634+00

copywrong?

2006-01-14 20:03:11.978634+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Wow. So, I've got a leaky shower valve, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to take it apart. Punch "shower valve take apart" into Google . Click on DoItYourself.com: Repairing Faucets & Valves. Not quite what I'm looking for, so click on Ace Hardware: Repairing Faucets and Valves. Notice that, huh, the text and drawings seem remarkably similar. Go down the list, oh, look, Cole Hardware's page uses the same text and graphics, including the numbering graphics from that first one. And Aubuchon Hardware's page follows the trend.

So are these all licensed? Only the Cole Hardware page offers credit to a third party source? Or are we seeing copyright infringement on a scale not seen since the heyday of Napster?

Snicker: As we go down the results I also see "female masturbation in the shower". Gives a whole new meaning to "repairing the plumbing", I guess...

#Comment Re: copywrong made: 2006-01-15 23:46:37.904047+00 by: andylyke

I taught for a very short while (until I figured out what was going on)in a for-profit diploma mill (example of ethics - in 2002, students were paying 10% on "student loans" arranged for them by the "school"). anyway - students >strike that< pupils who were barely literate handed in very erudite, or at least polysyllabic, papers, which I took to checking by typing a sentence into Google. Invariably, as you might surmise, I found the source, or should I say sources, as almost as invariably, three or more sites popped up with exactly the same text, and absolutely no attribution. How do you teach character and "how it's done" to kids who see naught but plagiarism all around them?

#Comment Re: made: 2006-01-16 01:56:07.830808+00 by: meuon [edit history]

An English teacher I know UTC has been failing students for such outright plagerism, he's gotten some pressure to keep them as paying clients, but so far it's been as it should, and they fail the course.

When I was in High School and Last Chance (Lewis and Clark) Community College, I used an extensive vocabulary and unique style in all of my classes. And sometimes, I let people plagarise my work. It always had the same effect: I got an A (sometimes B), and they got nailed for copying from me. They would not try it again.

On the web, I've often had product images I've taken for a customers site end up on their competitors website. In two cases, the original manufacturer grabbed the high res photo's and distributed them to the other vendors. In one case, it got my customer a hefty extra discount on all future orders. In the other, the company just admitted error and asked everyone to pull the images.

Actually, Dan, there is acknowledgement, although not a copyright notice. If you go back to either the Ace or DIY pages, you'll see a statement in the final paragraph of body text that "Information in this brochure has been furnished by the National Retail Hardware Association (NRHA) and associated contributors."

Ace is certainly a member of the NRHA and as such may be entitled to reproduce this material without explicit copyright acknowledgement. After all, the NRHA *wants* their how-to booklets to be distributed. The case of DoItYourself.com is a little more complex since I didn't think they were associated with a particular hardware retailer. Anyway, my point is that it's not exactly plagiarism - there may be mitigating circumstances in this case.