This is a entry from the DiaryMasters diary at OD+. As it also affects us over here (and the last two points are things I’m guilty of), and not all of you read DM’s diary, I thought I would reproduce it here.
Copying Other’s Work 7/18/2002
Hello all,
A couple of things I want to talk about today – they are related, and tend to cause problems on the site.
The first is copying and pasting another diarist’s writings into your own diary. While this is fine if you have the permission of the original diarist, it is not fine if the author has not given consent. Please, if you want to reproduce somebody’s diary writings in your own diary, ask for their consent first. If you don’t think that the diarist would like you to reproduce their work, or wouldn’t give permission, then you should not be copying it. To me, this is just common diary courtesy.
The other issue is the use by our diarists of pictures, poems, or other written works that are owned by people outside of OD. We get several complaints per week about diarists who have linked pictures from another person’s server into their diary, or who have borrowed a piece of written work and posted it without permission. In most cases, such work is copyrighted – and it is illegal to reproduce it in your diary without permission from the original author. Even if the work is not copyrighted, it is still a matter of common courtesy to ask permission to reproduce work or link to images on another server.
A related problem caused by linking to images on another server is something called bandwidth theft. If you link a picture into your diary, and the picture resides on another person’s server, every time that picture is displayed in your diary it is being served from the original server. This means that the cost of serving that image every time somebody reads your diary is being paid by the person who pays for the traffic on that original server (hope that made sense). People don’t like this (thus the name “bandwidth theft”), especially if they have not been asked permission for the picture to be linked from their server.
In any case, please make sure that you secure permission before copying, reproducing, or linking to somebody else’s work in your own diary.
Thanks,
The DiaryMaster
Will
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