Is it immoral to "use" someone's content to create something unique?
What I personally find Immoral is that every time I post a comment in the forums of this site on ANY Thread that You (the OP) are involved in I GET BANNED!!
I not only find that Immoral but I also find it highly questionable, given that my responses are certainly more balanced than the subjective efforts that certain parties continuously use to bait the forums with!
WHY on earth would you ever consider stealing or spinning the work of others?
WHY on earth would you consider that their original content is there for the benefit of content thieves that harbor a similar justification to that which you are presenting here?
Would your reasoning or justification for such an action be similar to those statements that you made several months ago when you attacked MY morals and had me banned during my efforts to catch the site content thieves calling themselves 68 Articles?
Oh.... And if you consider that this post is a 'Personal Attack' on your 'Good Nature' - It isn't. But it is completely in context with the 'Nature' of the 'Moral Standing' of your post.
Like many others, I despise having my personally created, original works 'doctored' by anyone who feels justified in raping or stealing them.... But then to 'Some' my stance could be questioned as being an author of the copyright merely wishing to hold the 'Moral High Ground' over some poor, unfortunate, immoral party who feels aggrieved when challenged.
How many times have we had our work stolen here Melbel?
- Sooner or later we all get sick and tired of thieves and those others who justify similar use and abuse of our creative efforts!
DO YOUR OWN WORK and Make the effort (at least) to justify the title 'Writer' by NOT Bastardizing the efforts of others!
I heard that somewhere as well.
Oh yeah, I would definitely use multiple sources for research, most definitely. I'm just curious where this stands. This article I wanted to based some of my research off of has some good facts and then there is stuff in it that I KNOW is wrong and then there is stuff the writer left out as well.
Thank you for the clarification on this from a legal standpoint.
@PD - If you get banned for posts that you make, how is that immoral on the part of others that participate in your threads? I don't ban you. I have no moderating ability here. I commend you for your work in bringing to light the 68articles thing, I do. This is simply a question of morality and is something I wouldn't do simply because it doesn't 'feel right' to me. The point of this thread is rather to get others' points of view on this issue.
And, PD, remember that writing isn't the only thing that people "steal." Photos, for example, should be used ONLY from sources that give permission for their use on your hubs. And even then, many of them require attribution. There are a couple of hubs and sections in the learning center all about using photos without permission that you might want to check out. You know, if you're curious.
Yeah, I don't copy ideas from other hubbers. When I am writing a new hub and I come up with a title and the thing says "the url is taken" I take a look at that article. If it's something that someone obviously put a lot of time and thought into, I won't even write a hub of the same topic. Now, if it's not, then I'll continue and write my hub but I won't use their hub as any part of my research. I basically just scan to see "the hub I'm up against." Good thoughts.
On another writing site, this kind of issue was presented this way:
If the information is something you know for a fact because it's either personal experience or assimilated knowledge, and you didn't use any source to come up with what you wrote - no references required because there aren't any.
If the information is information that is already widely known (i.e., Shakespeare's first name was "William", or else he wrote "MacBeth") no reference is needed (as long as it's widely known information, and even if some poorly informed people don't already know it).
If you use anything that someone else wrote as part of information you present in your own article it requires a reference. If I write a crappy article and give information, and if you use the information I give in your article, you got the information from me - not from your own experience, assimilated knowledge acquired over the course of your life, etc.
It's not really about whether one person offers a piece of information/idea somewhere but it's also in other places. It's about what you use to come up with the information in your own article. If the person with the poorly written article has a piece of solid information in it, I think the answer would be to see if someone with a better article offers the same information and would make a better looking, more credible, reference. If that person has some isolated piece of information that isn't showing up in other sources then I think the person deserves the credit and the reference (and that your article will be built on "questionable foundation". Why? Because if you didn't think up the information yourself you probably weren't involved with the reasoning that led to coming up with it on your own. The other thing is that if you write an article and don't give credit where credit is due, it's not the information in question - it's your integrity and professionalism as a writer/content-producer.
There's a difference, though, between factual information and "ideas in general". If I write a Hub about making cookies however I make them, someone else is free to write his own article about making cookies and approach it his own way.
In the Joe Schmo thing with Shakespeare's birthday, if JS is absolutely the only one who knew that day, then your article to state where you got that piece of information from (and that was Joe Schmo). If Joe Schmo was the only one who knew it hundreds of years ago, and if the world has since accepted that date as the correct one, then that's "widely known" and wouldn't require a reference to Joe S.
Something people should be careful about, though, is this: There are people who think the only way a piece of writing can possibly earn any money, or is even worth its space on the Internet, is if the article is obviously and well designed with SEO in mind (and the whole "Internet thinking thing" in mind. Someone like that may run into what looks to him like a "crappy article", but there really is such a thing as non-SEO'd-up articles and/or even horribly written articles that make money for the author. People shouldn't presume that because an article doesn't look like the kind of thing that earns a money for the author that it doesn't.
Besides, just because someone looks like they aren't involved in earning money with their articles ("because their article is so obviously crappy"), that doesn't mean that treating their writing with less respect or less professionalism is perfectly fine.
The Internet is full of people who operate on the idea that what's out there is up for grabs, and that's just how things are done. It's also full of people who know that's how it is and know not to put anything they really care about on the Internet. So, in general, what's "immoral" almost doesn't matter if a writer is OK with knowing he doesn't come up with his own ideas (or that he swiped someone else's, didn't give him credit, and passed it off as his own). A lot of students think everyone else cheats and copies, and that it's fine, too.
Personally, I don't think the "that's-what-everyone-does" mentality changes whether something is "immoral" or unprofessional. There is, and always will be, something to be said for knowing that what we've written is something we've come up with on our own, something we can back up with reason, logic and/or specific references.
Besides, if I knew someone's article was so crappy that I didn't want to include it as a reference I'd feel like a) I should maybe question how credible the information/idea was at all and/or b) I was exploiting someone else's lack of expertise/interest in producing a better looking article.
(I do think it does make a good philosophical discussion, though. )Wow! This was well thought out. Thank you for the really thorough response.
I think what I'll do when I come across a situation like this again, I'll look for a more credible source and cite it. The article I'd found was full of information that many programmers already know as it's taught in classes, written in hundreds of books, etc, so it's not really original, but I guess this guy was the first to give me the idea to write on it.
Your response has definitely given me a lot to think about. It's like DAMN, HW, you should write a hub on this!
princess g just summarized it well, I'd say. The only other thing I'll add is when I used to write linguistics papers, it was always the practice to quote one's sources and give credit where credit is due. I've noted sources in my hubs when appropriate and have seen other hubbers do this too. Do this, and then write!
Hi
It seems to me, that you would be inspired, by someone else's ideas, to write a new, original and different hub, of your own. You would not simply be re-writing the article, but using it as one of your sources.
According to my understanding, one cannot 'copyright' ideas.
Anything that was very close to the original could be quoted ~ placed within quotation marks ~ or credited by saying something like 'according to ... '
Information, such as dates, is generally used by anyone and everyone, but if it were new and original research, and I were using it, then I would note this in my article ~ crediting the researcher.
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