(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

WHEN I am asked to speak up about an unfairness that I feel rather strongly about, I usually do. When I am asked to speak up about an unfairness that has been laid at the foot of a person that I admire and respect, I do not only speak up. I tend to raise my voice and wave my arms around a bit! So sit down and listen up! A friend of mine has been wronged and I am a little bit bothered about it.

As some of my readers know, I was greatly inspired by another online journalist to finally produce my own online journal. The journalist that I refer to is named Yen. Her site [was] at www.nostalgicthoughts.com. Before I even started my site I had recommended Yen’s site to some of you. I told you of the professional quality of her writings, page layouts, and graphics. Over a period of several months, she and I exchanged several friendly emails. Then, with Yen’s promise to be my first reader, I finally presented this journal to the world while on vacation at Christmas time 2000.

Okay. Let me cut to the chase.

NOT too long ago, Yen sent an email to me and asked if I would take a look at a certain woman’s website. She told me that the woman stole her site design and even copied some of her writing word for word! Sure enough! There it was! Someone stole Yen’s site, put a different coat of paint on it and said to the world, “Look what I made!” What an oyster! (Yes, honey, you get the oyster of the month award! Congratulations!) I do not have enough respect for this girl to put a link to her site in this article. I think that Yen did a very nice job in her journal entry on this issue. In her article she asked others to speak up about copyright infringement.

Now take a step back because here is where the arm waving begins! Let me talk to you about copyright infringement for a bit.

FIRST, a quick definition from Webster’s Dictionary is in order. COPYRIGHT : “the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish and sell the MATTER and FORM of a literary, musical, or artistic work.”

A “copyright” is the sole right of the creator of such a work to do as they wish with their work. They have the EXCLUSIVE right to reproduce their work. They have the EXCLUSIVE right to publish their work. They have the EXCLUSIVE right to sell their work. It is THEIRS. They have the RIGHT to COPY their work in whatever way they wish for whatever purposes they wish. And exclusive means that NO ONE else has the right to copy their work without their permission.

So what does Webster’s definition mean when it speaks of “the MATTER and FORM” of a person’s work? Well, the MATTER would be the basic “guts” of the work. The words of a literary work. The musical notes, melodies, etc. of a musical work. The individual aspects of an artistic work. The FORM is the structure and appearance of the work. The layout of a literary work. The way that notes, melodies, etc. are combined and also the way they are printed on paper. The overall design of an artistic work.

MATTER and FORM mean substance. I was once told that as soon as I put my thoughts onto paper and gave substance to those thoughts, I had the sole copyright to those words. Once someone takes their intangible thoughts and creative ideas and makes them tangible in some type of form that can be reproduced, published, or sold, they have the copyright on their creation. (I found a very good article on this at whatiscopyright.org.)

HOW does this apply to someone’s website? Well, let me ask this. What are the pieces that make up a website? Usually there is some kind of text on a web page that someone wrote. So there is definitely literary work involved. Usually there is artistic work involved in the form of graphics, page layout, photographs, color schemes, etc. These things are the “guts”, the MATTER of a website. But what is it that puts it all together and gives it structure and FORM? Well this would definitely be HTML, “Hyper Text Markup Language,” and possibly several other programming languages such as JavaScript. This HTML is a tangible thing. You can see it. You can print it out. The “tags” are arranged in such a way to give the designer the look and functionality that he or she has designed. The tags are combined and organized in such a way to give structure to the content of the web page, just as the notes on the score of a musical composition give structure and uniqueness to a symphony. It is an artistic and literary work combined. And the creator of a “web symphony” has exclusive rights to their masterpiece just as surely as Vivaldi had the exclusive rights to the “Four Seasons” (Oooo! My favorite!) when he gave expression to its beautiful movements on his piano and wrote the notes down on paper.

Now, it takes time to design a website and code the HTML, just as it takes time to create any other work of art. And for we “sickos” who do all of our coding in Notepad (That’s right, honey! Real men use Notepad!), it sometimes takes a considerable amount of time to hammer things out, make the material pliable, pound, scrape, chisel and tweak to get just the look we want. Though it has not happened to me (that I know of), to see your hard work being claimed by someone else as their own is something that would really get you mad! To see your website design on someone else’s site would really get you peeved! A cheap coat of paint cannot hide what is really underneath! An artist knows his own work well enough to see right through such a cover up.

YOU KNOW, the whole issue of copyright is an ethical issue of respect for another person and their work. What is yours is yours and what is mine is mine. If I give you permission to use something that I have created, fine. But until then keep your grubby paws off my stuff, man! Have some respect. The Internet should not be a free for all. You cannot just grab and take whatever you want. Have some ethics.

Why do we sometimes forget our ethics when we log onto the Internet? We hide behind our user ids and screen names. We shout insults at each other in chat rooms. We scream in capital letters in our emails. My how brave we are sitting on our soft behinds in front of our monitors with a loaded keyboard! We take advantage of the vastness of the Internet and misuse our anonymity. The Internet provides us with so many ways and opportunities to communicate, learn, grow and establish friendships with people that we would have never met without the aid of the web. We take that which should enrich our lives and draw us closer together and misuse it in our selfishness and inconsideration. I have heard it said that the more that technology advances, the more isolated we become as people. Some blame technology for this. I rather blame the innate selfishness of the human race for this. The ever increasing technological advances just make it easier to express our lack of love for one another on a broader scale. It is not the technology. It is the humans abusing the technology. We take something that is good, use it for our own selfish purposes while disregarding others and becoming less human in the process. It is an issue of love. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Ah! But who is my neighbor? On the Internet there are so many “neighbors” just a click away. My how the world is shrinking! A woman in California is neighbor to a woman in Japan. A guy in New Jersey is neighbor to them both. Let’s have some ethics. Let’s have some love. Lets’ have some respect for each other as artists, as web designers, as humans.

At this point, several people have written articles in response to Yen’s request. This is my attempt to shed some light on the issue of copyright infringement and, more importantly, to stick up for a friend. I checked the other person’s site just before posting this and noticed that she has made only a few minor changes to it. But the majority of her site still looks the same as Yen’s. I hope that she will reconsider her initial response to Yen’s request that she change her site and make noticeable changes. I am sure she will gain more respect, and perhaps even some readers, if she does.