Early in November I posted a message here to ask for advice on
how to prove that I publish an FAQ because I had found an old FAQ
of mine printed in a magazine and attributed to someone else. I
received a handful of replies. One person said "if you don't want
people to read it, why post it?" one pointed me to the Walnut Creek
CD-ROMs and another asked if it was worth the bother of complaining.
I was hoping to post a message here when it was all over, but it
seems to be an on-going issue and so I thought I'd add my story
while a copyright thread is going on.
Some background: I maintain the list of Internet access providers
in the UK. I post two lists: one is a compilation of free-form
entries by the providers and the other, based on the PDIAL format
with added fields, is posted additionally to news.answers. I
didn't realise when I first started maintaining these, a year
and a half ago, how important they'd become. You must be aware of
the explosion of interest in the media in the "Superhighway" [gak]
and, in the last six months the number of UK providers has doubled
(to about 40) and the number of UK Internet magazines has gone from
0 to 5, books 0 to 3.
About 10% of the information in the lists changes every month.
The material for the lists is collected monthly and, even though the
providers write their own entries, I have a copyright notice on the
*compilation* because the time to maintain the lists is not
insignificant. The lists are also available for ftp, via a mailing
list and, recently, on the WWW.
Over the course of the last year and a half, I have had about a
dozen publishers contact me for permission to use the lists. I
always give my permission under the condition that a) they credit
the source and b) they take the most current information. As
far as I know they've been published, with my permission, by
EduMagic on CD-ROM, in two new UK Internet books and in various
newsletters.
In the last few months, the summary list has appeared without my
permission, without credit to me and attributed to someone else,
in one book and 3 magazines. I heard of it in a magazine first
and was dismayed to find that, besides crediting the compilation
to someone else, they had used information from June. The
June list recently appeared in another magazine this week.
It is easy to demonstrate the source of the list (with something
like a 90% overlap) when mistakes are reproduced in articles, and
I know that publishers could contact providers individually and may
be sent the entries that appear in the lists, but this doesn't seem
to be the case.
I decided that what I wanted from these publishers was a) an
apology in the next issue, crediting the source of the information,
b) payment of their per-page rate for compensation and c) to
know about the free mailing list for monthly updates or that I would
be willing to prepare the list in a specified format to specified
deadlines if I was paid the going per-page rate.
I found myself an Internet-savvy solictor and he has sent a letter
to one of the magazines and I will be paying real money for him to
write me a proper copyright notice. One of the magazines which
included the list used the most current information but didn't credit
the source and I was reluctant to take them on since they are backed
by a huge publishing company. I e-mailed the editor instead and had
no reply in two weeks. By chance I met up with a writer for
them on IRC who offered to take my mail to another of the editors
himself and have a word with them. I got a reply today from an
editor, agreeing to print an apology, to pay me for the article
and to offer me money for future updates (!). I am somewhat relieved.
In all of this, what has pissed me off the most is the cheek of
deliberately editing out both my copyright notice and my name
from the lists and passing it off as their own work. That two
magazines published 6-month old information means that the
providers look bad too (wrong phone numbers, services, prices, missing
providers).
To date I have resisted posting to uk.media (which is read by most
editors of the new magazines ) and uk.net (read by the service providers)
but my feeling has been that publishers are underestimating the very
thing that they are making a profit on, the power of the net to be heard.
It seems to me that while they appear to revere the Internet, they
simultanously abuse the very kind of people who made it was it is
today, by striving to share information freely on the Internet. A
case of biting the hand that feeds you.
As for Walnut Creek, granted they should have asked for permission,
and what they are doing is illegal but I am assuming that they
are using whole FAQs with copyright notices and author's name intact.
Compared to the other infringements, I am not bothered by this one
as much, since each entry in my list is marked with a date of when it
was last updated and it contains details of how to get current versions.
Finally, I have had much conflicting advice about copyright of FAQs.
Some believe that by publishing it on the Internet it is "more than
in the public domain" and that I cannot claim damages for something
which is published freely. I have accepted that the commercial world
has latched onto the Internet and I am willing to play the game to
protect my rights. That I publish something *freely* on the Internet
is irrelevant; that someone can make money from it proves that it
is worth something to someone and is therefore worth protecting.
Paola
-- http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~paola/inetuk/
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