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The biggest lie on the Internet...
is that ridiculous disclaimer plastered over too many clueless websites
On copyright being useless because it's recent
I just attended the 2013 Economics and Commons Conference in Berlin. During the Knowledge stream of that event something came up that has bothered me for a long time: the assertion that copyright is useless also because it’s just a few centuries old, and artists were doing just fine even before, thank you very much. Here is what I would have repeated, if there had been more time during those sessions.
I find this particular argument against copyright very, very weak, to say the least, and I’d really like to see it go, for at least three reasons:
How to deal with websites who exist only to put ads inside copied content
Every now and then, I come across websites that don’t contain anything original. All their “pages” are verbatim copies of original content found online and copied automatically without permission, just to fill it with advertising banners. When I find such a website copying stuff I wrote, I send them the email you can find below, and I must say it normally works very well, and quite quickly too. You’re welcome to reuse it whenever you find a website of that kind. Actually, I strongly encourage you to do it, to help make the Web a bit more useful for everybody.
Angola ghost town shows the mess that "professional media" make of copyright
In the afternoon of July 4th, 2012, I found in my RSS reader the link to a photographic gallery on the website of “La Repubblica”, one of the biggest italian newspapers, titled Angola: la città fantasma “made in china” (Angola, the “Made in China” ghost town): five blurry pictures, without any attribution, and a caption explaining that: