Apparently, Big Brother is alive and well in Pacific County. In fact, he has been reading my blog. Not only that, he has referred to my website and even used cut-and-paste portions of at least one Oysterville Daybook entry in an Official Departmental Memo. My words are now a part of the public record.
This intriguing bit of information was pointed out to me by a neighbor who then sent me a copy of the memo. “Verrry interrresting” as Laugh In ‘s Arte Johnson used to say. The memo included an excerpt from a blog I had written more than a year ago in praise of a local happening. Unfortunately, my words were lifted and used for another purpose altogether – a rather nefarious purpose from my point of view.
Interestingly, even though no one asked to use the paragraphs from my blog, I was given full credit for having written them and my website address was cited as a reference. If I try to find a positive side to the situation, I guess I can think of this as evidence that someone out there takes my words seriously. On the other hand, it is disheartening to feel that my thoughts are taken out of context and used without my knowledge in a way that could potentially injure a friend and neighbor.
To give the County its due, the memo writer – a County employee who was passing the information to his superiors – said “Got a complaint this morning…” I guess I can assume from that phrase that the County is continuing to do their business ‘as directed by citizen complaint’ and that they probably weren’t culling my blogs directly to find matters of “high importance” that might show up on the web. (That’s how the memo was labled: “Importance: High.”)
On the other hand, it means that at least one of my ‘faithful readers’ follows my blog with less-than-righteous intent. Not a good feeling. But, hey! Although our community is small, it is peopled with folks of every stripe. It’s not all ‘sweetness and light’ even in Oysterville!
With havin so much content do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright violation?
My website has a lot of completely unique content I’ve either written myself or outsourced but it seems a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my authorization. Do you know any methods to help prevent content from being stolen? I’d definitely appreciate it.
No, I don’t worry about copyright infringement very much. Once I began publishing on the web, I became pretty philosophical about it. Most of what I write is “out there” anyway in some form or other. My primary interest is in perpetuating our local history and I gather my information from many sources, so if I also become a “source” for someone… so be it. On the other hand, I do depend upon most of my published work as a source of income and, if I became aware that someone was using my material, word for word, without giving any credit to me, I would definitely seek the advice of my attorney. Especially, if they were making money from what “they” had written!