h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Even as a writer who writes for a hobby and as a small part of their job (actually my website feels like it's written in blood-streaked sweat sometimes), I know that anything I write is my copyright. I don't have to 'claim' copyright over it. Some of my h2g2 articles have been stolen and passed off as other people's work. I live with it, although sometimes I post comments or in guestbooks if possible.

So when I see someone distributing someone elses copyright, and after being asked (by two people, one of them being me) if he had permission, and a brief discussion about how actually it was extremely unlikely he had permission because I was given it as part of a course I paid for, and the other person questioning his permission knows the author and had hosted the course herself. The person distributing the copyright material claimed he considered it in the public domain as it was 'promotional material'.

We are talking about a 38 page document...


It was eventually removed, but who knows where else he has posted it. He's been unfriended. If I was closer, I'd garotte his goolies.

The whole idea of intellectual property seems to be slowly disappearing... Very few people seem to respect other people's labour... And that includes MP3 & film downloads

MP3 sharing has always been around, only we used to call it 'taping off the radio'.

What annoyed me so much was AFTER he had been told by TWO different people that it was extremely unlikely he was correct, he still stood his ground and denied he was doing anything wrong. This was on a facebook group, and he's had the bare-faced cheek to remove someone from the group for 'breach of confidentiality' because she checked with the author whether it was okay to distribute or not. 'Breach of copyright' clearly not a problem in his eyes.

A likely future US presidential candidate (Rand Paul) has recently been caught up in a plagiarism scandal. In a recent speech, he quoted verbatim from the wikipedia article about a film. When accused of the obvious plagiarism, his reply was that he hadn't plagiarised because he hadn't quoted the actual film, just the description.

Since then, other instances have been revealed where he's plagiarized verbatim from magazine articles. He's now accepted the plagiarism charges, barely, but he's blaming it on a busy schedule and said he'll now make available a citation list for future speaches.

Mostly he's blaming this whole affair on overzealous, liberal journalists like Rachel Maddow. "Why won't they just let it drop?"

His acting like the victim of this scandal.