Posts tagged with "stealing"

More Stolen Words and Pictures

Most recent­ly, a per­son called Cleo, who also goes by the mis­nomer “sexy1980”, stole both words and pic­tures from a heart­felt entry I wrote after a par­tic­u­lar­ly hard day. Word-for-word. You see that car on her site? That’s my car.

Cleo steals

If you dare to look at this abor­tion of a web page, do so at your own risk. I warn you, the ani­ma­tions and colours are not for the feint of heart.

I was­n’t hap­py when some­one start­ed copy­ing entire entries of mine, word-for-word, or when anoth­er per­son stole my design of Version 10 (his attempt­ed redesign in an effort to cov­er up his actions isn’t that far off either). Sure, I also get peo­ple hotlink­ing my images too, but I take sim­ple plea­sure in replac­ing the images with pic­tures of a lemon par­ty, because I get to laugh at things like this.

But when some­one steals both my words and hotlinks my pic­tures I get real­ly pissed off.

Design Robbery

After my Perishable Press inter­view, and hav­ing Version 10 fea­tured in a Crestock arti­cle titled “13 Minimalist Designs You Really Should See”, this site has seen a surge in design-relat­ed traf­fic. But increased expo­sure is a dou­ble-edged sword. Higher pro­file sites make you a big­ger tar­get for secu­ri­ty issues, spam, and design rob­bery.

Such as the case with eric-akmal.com.

Does this look famil­iar?

Eric Akmal Dot Com top

Eric Akmal Dot Com bottom

Continue read­ing “Design Robbery”…

Carlo The Crook

Edit: Carlo has tak­en down his site. I’ve put up a cached ver­sion. Thanks to every­one for the sup­port — goes to show that a voice can count for some­thing on the inter­net.

Carlo, who lives some­where in Metro Manila and some­times, not most of the time, in Pangasinan, Philippines, has stolen from me. There are oth­ers who steal my work, but this is usu­al­ly the pic­tures I take, which they use as back­grounds for their own sites (most com­mon­ly the star­ry sky at Bancroft). I try not to take offence to this; the file sizes are com­mon­ly small, so it does­n’t make much of a dent in my month­ly band­width. There are also peo­ple like Sophia, who has made her pres­ence known to me, and uses my words every so often in her own writ­ing as a flat­ter­ing ges­ture.

Carlo is dif­fer­ent.

He’s tak­en one of my entries and passed it off as his own.
Word for word.

This entry, which I strug­gled days to write, into which I poured my heart, was post­ed on his blog a day after mine. He did change the title, although I think this hard­ly ame­lio­rates his actions. He also used my Petal Game pic­ture (per­haps with­out notic­ing my water­mark in the low­er right-hand cor­ner), as well as a line from my post inspired by Eternal Sunshine, for a dif­fer­ent entry.

It sad­dens me to think not of how eas­i­ly some­one can steal things on the inter­net, but how will­ing they are to do it. I can only won­der how many oth­er peo­ple have stolen from me. Lorelle, who offers some great points on what to do if some­one steals your con­tent, sug­gests open com­mu­ni­ca­tion, in com­bi­na­tion with as a let­ter of cease and decist. And while I’m in com­plete agree­ment with this, I felt that for the first time I should write about it instead, to make it pub­lic, so that oth­ers may be aware of their own works. There are peo­ple who will quote with­out ref­er­enc­ing. There are peo­ple who will take with­out return­ing.

Because what’s the point of blog­ging, when one’s words aren’t one’s own?