What to Do When Someone Steals Your Work | Hacker News Reader

What to Do When Someone Steals Your Work

freelanceswitch.com

My policy for personal projects? Let them and move on. Even if they make $1m for my work and get covered by NYTimes, let them. Once I have published my work, nobody can do anything to make it less valuable to me. What I got from my work was the experience and pride in making it. I am proud of what I do and don't much care for accolades or money once the project is finished, even if it cost me something small. Nevertheless, I put copyright notices on my work (CC dowhatever-license) and request that they notify me before publishing my work.

If I ever needed to really protect my work, I wouldn't hesitate to put simple non-annoying/non-intrusive software blocks to deter most casual infringements however, I would never put in crazy DRM. And if someone still manages to steal it, I would let them and move on.

I put my work into the public domain when possible (employers and licenses of stuff I use permitting), but I do care about money, and to a lesser extent accolades. This puts me in the rhetorically enviable position of being a person who creates for a living, does care about money, and still doesn't believe in the ownership of information in the abstract. ;)

> rhetorically enviable position

On the other hand, using yourself as a personal example (based on your own self-evaluation of yourself, which we have no way to assess the accuracy of for ourselves) is a rhetorical error. Your personal attributes are irrelevant to the truth, and anyone who doesn't want to believe your conclusion can easily call them into question and distract from the real issue.

Well, it mostly just helps when someone says, "Well, if you'd ever created anything, you'd understand!" or "Well, if you were a writer|artist|filmmaker|programmer, you'd understand!"

That is, I only seriously bring it out when someone explains with a pat on the head that when I grow up and start actually creating stuff, my views on copyright and patents will suddenly change and I'll be in favor of them.

I don't think it's worth one's time to prepare strategies for how to deal with invalid arguments that would only be raised by people who aren't going to listen in any case (they either not seriously trying, or very stupid, or very ignorant of what constitutes a good or bad argument).

Oh, I didn't prepare it ahead of time; that's the most basic argument many people have, and I've heard it over and over since I first came to this viewpoint ~20 years ago.

Well, it has not changed my views (admittedly I am not entirely anti-copyright, only against current laws). Anyway, why should someone's view be more valid because they have a vested interest?

I do find plagiarism and copying that is not properly attributed, or that is not necessary very annoying. Why do people copy and paste text from my website to Wikipedia, Scribd and other places? Why not just link? Why not attribute properly.

Most sites are pretty good at dealing with this - A Wikipedia editor spotted it a copy and paste and took down the content before I got round to complaining, but Scribd seems to go out of its way to make it as difficult as possible (written DMCA notices only).

It seems his post was rhetorically enviable in the meta, as well.

What would I do? I'd collect a bunch of irrefutable proof and try the case in public as a way to generate publicity for my project.

It can be to your advantage if your competition steals from you because (1) they don't understand the context, (2) they copy the flaws, and (3) you'll always be ahead of them by at least a few months since the stuff they copied is old.

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