Where’d they go?
The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed my blog posts have disappeared—all but the latest and those containing your own work.
How many of you are familiar with a thing called copyright?
If you want to be writers, you’d better be.
Wow, I had about six golden months of blogging my little heart out, waxing eloquent on anything I wanted, safe in the knowledge that the only people reading it were my husband and two writer friends. It was wonderful! Then I got some exposure among the mega-numbers, and suddenly I had readers. And you know what? It was even more wonderful! Cool people with smart brains saying nice things! Appreciation is such an amazing invention!
Then yesterday I discovered something I’d been hoping wouldn’t happen—someone out there didn’t just quote me or refer to me or throw up a link recommending me. Someone lifted an entire post and published it on their own site. Without so much as dropping me a line.
Friends, there’s this little social and legal convention called ASKING FIRST.
Remember kindergarten? Remember the sandbox? Remember seeing someone else playing with a really cool toy they’d brought from home and having a great idea about how to use it and wanting to just snatch it and show everyone? Remember the teacher kindly but firmly reminding you: “We don’t take things from others without asking”? And it wasn’t enough to just slip in an announcement, “I’m going to take that.” You had to actually ASK.
And abide by the answer! <—important
Now, I know as well as you do that social conventions on the Internet are in great turmoil these days, as blogs become as common as conversations and piracy issues are hammered out in full view of everyone. I also know—better than many, I’m guessing—how easy it is to have a lapse in common sense and inadvertently put myself in the position of having to apologize for some stupid blunder. So I’m willing to cut a certain amount of slack.
But social conventions are not the same thing as legal conventions. And copyright covers everything anyone writes. It’s theirs. As it should be.
Folks, I work hard on these blog posts. I put thirty years’ experience and education and writing skill into them, and I do it so all of you out there standing where I stood thirty years ago can get that leg up I so desperately needed then. I like to be a nice person—I really do. It makes me feel superior to mean people.
I also do it to promote my own (laughably-cheap) services. I have to make a living, like everyone else.
Please don’t take my hard work and use it to promote your own site without even asking. That’s not nice. And it’s kind of a slap in the face to someone who’s putting in a lot of free work for your benefit, whether you ever hire me or not.
You may be giddy over the virtual anarchy of this booming technology. But anarchy is no more or less than society based entirely on good manners.
Remember your manners.
ASK FIRST.
If you don’t, you’re violating legal copyright and opening yourself up to a lawsuit. And that works for all written material, writers.
