This month's column was prompted in part by a question posed to me by a Gentle Reader whose library has a very special patron who has copied the library's Web site and posted it on his own server with derogatory information plastered all overit. The question was, "What is and what is not legal on library premises?" But the answer is both broader and more pointed. My personal recommendation is bellicose but effective: If people rip off your stuff, take them to court and make sure theygo up the river. Show no mercy and no hesitation. I want to hear whimpering when the sentence is read. As an information professional, it's your responsibility to do what you can to keep those miscreants from harming others. You need to do this not just on your own behalf, but on behalf of all the folks who are getting ripped off every day on the Web and may not always have the resources or awareness to fight back. Content theft goes on much more than you realize (probably because most thieves don't do you the courtesy of tipping you off that they've stolen your content). One very well-known example of site theft happened repeatedly to a Civil War site (sunsite.utk.edu/civilwar/warweb.html) created by George Hoemann, assistant director for distance education and independent study at the University of Tennessee. Hoemann told me that the site had been stolen several times that he was aware of "and many more, I'm sure, that I'm not aware of." The site launched in February 1995 and the earliest known complete copying occurred in April of 1996. "The most egregious example of this type of copying occurred in 1998--right as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was being debated in Congress. The culprit? A lawyer!" Quite often the content is modified just enough to disguise its origins, and often it is never updated (thieves being by definition too lazy to create content, anyway).
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