Give me a break

I am going to borrow from John Stossel’s news reports called “Give Me a Break” today.

As a writer, my goal is to reach and engage as many people as possible.  It also means constantly having to come up with something new and exciting to write about.  It also means that I’ve seen my original content “borrowed” many times whether I want it to or not.

Whether it was articles I’ve written, marketing programs I created, and/or even proposal ideas that another company took as their own; anything and everything is up for grabs in an Internet based world.  The way I see it, you can either take the reprinting of content as a compliment or copyright.  I choose compliment.  In part because I have no idea where to draw the line and prefer not to waste my time fighting with people when I could be winning them over instead.  It seems I might be in the minority.

Where’s the line?

Why do news websites get to report and print pictures and it is ok but if blogger sites do the same thing, they are considered thieves?

What is considered a “legitimate” news site?  Is it the number of articles on the site, the writers, or something else?

Do articles or content have a shelf life?

Can writers forget or rescind their permission?

So, how does this relate to my “Give Me A Break” theme?  Well, today I got a call from a magazine that said we had re-printed an article from one of their writer’s without permission.  First, we always get permission from writers.  Second, we always give attribution.  Third, this particular article was over 10 years old and buried on our website in a “dead articles” area. (i.e. no one except the writer even knew it existed there anymore).

What may have inadvertently brought this article back to life is our new website software.  The software is very in-tuned to search engines and we are now getting higher than ever page rankings.  So, much so, that I think we might have started to get higher rankings from this article than the author.  That’s what I believe got them to call us.  Funny thing, after re-reading the article (it’s been so long since we have seen it) we realized it did not belong on our website.  It was out of date, a bit “dark” in theme, and in the time on our website had garnered a whopping 33 readers.

So, we removed it.  Is this justice served or much ado about nothing?

GIVE ME A BREAK!