Making it Right

Yesterday, during the PD Session, I got a chance to take a sneak peek at my email while waiting to go on and saw a message addressed to me entitled “Copyright Infringement”.  I didn’t have time to even open the message, figuring that it might well be just another piece of spam anyway.  It wasn’t until later that I had a chance to take a look.

It was, in fact, a legitimate message.

I think it’s the thing that most bloggers dread most – someone calling you out as a plagiarist or that your content has somehow infringed on someone else’s copyright.  While all of the entries that I make are my original thoughts at the time, it’s not inconceivable that I’m influenced by some other piece of writing.

This morning, I sat down to seriously take a look at the message.  If you read this blog, you know that I’m usually good for a couple of entries a day.  One is my thoughts or comments on something and the other is an autopost from either my Diigo or my Delicious account of some content, resource, or application that I find particularly useful or that I’d like to tuck away for later.

Well, it turned out that the “copyright infringement” wasn’t actually something that I had done.  Thank goodness.  It turns out that an entity that I had bookmarked was posted by someone who had scraped the content from the original author.  I guess I was victim to one of these sites.  The content was good, great in fact, but it just didn’t belong to the site that I had bookmarked.  Ironically, I had also bookmarked the original site with the same content as well!  I felt at least a little redeemed on that!

The site was entitled “101 Free Alternatives to Commonly Used Paid Software” and can be found at this link.  In my dialogue back and forth with the person who contacted me, he pointed me to the originally incorrectly posted URL which is indeed a dead link.  I’m guessing that they were asked to take the post down.

So, I have done my best to make it right here.  The entry in my blog has been corrected as well as the Delicious and Diigo entries.  Kudos to the original author for staying on top of their content and asking folks to maintain their integrity.

Advertisement