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Subject:Re: i have some newbie questions From:Edwin Skau <eddy -dot- skau -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:12:18 +0530
Hi,
Some years ago, a door-to-door salesman once visited our apartment
selling padlocks. On our floor, the womenfolk often used the
interruption caused by a salesperson's visit to catch up on the latest
gossip. So it wasn't a surprise to find the padlock salesman
surrounded by four women, examining locks that he was selling at a
fraction of the market price for such locks.
Someone's husband stuck his head around the door and asked the
salesman, " How do we know if these locks are as good as a
store-bought lock? These locks are so cheap, maybe they're easy to
open."
The salesman answered with the wisdom you usually encounter with
hairdressers, waiters, and taxi drivers. "Sir," he said (in
surprisingly correct English), "Locks are for gentlemen. A lock is
intended to indicate that there is nobody home to receive visitors. It
will not keep a burglar out. If the lock is that good, the burglar
will just dig out your hinges, break a window, or enter your house
some other way."
A copyright statement works like that. Many readers will not copy
your work offhand; others will – copyright notice or not.
-------
If your tutorial is really good, expect at least some of it to be
copied by some e-learning factory or other. The problem is, you won't
recognize it in the fnal form.
These content sweatshops usually run their final work through a
"copyright checker" that compares their content with other content on
the Internet. Similarities show up and sentences
re-arranged/paraphrased to ensure that the similarity is blurred.
When you place any part of yourself in the public domain, you cannot
control what happens to it.
A copyright is a lock for decent people. Decency is about as rare as
common sense.
Deal with it.
-edwin
P.S. Does anyone have statistics on how many plagiarism suits have
been filed and how many won?
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