Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Rights issue

Yesterday, I did a small search on Google to see how my blog is doing. I was searching for my ACEGI article, and I found that it made the second result on Google, and that was great. I looked at the first result, and to my surprise, it was my article, but on another blog. No, this was not a link to my article, it was THE ARTICLE. I did not put it there, and no one asked me if they would have used it. At least the article was signed by "By Nassef", but that's just my last name. If you google that, I will not show up in the top results at all. They didn't ask my permission to use the article, they didn't put a link to my blog and they didn't even put my full name. I wrote a comment stating that I was mad at the action, even though that I was flattered that the article was good enough to be referenced and used by other people. They did not have the decency of showing up my comment. All they did was to make my last name "Nassef" signing the article as hyperlink to my blog, which shows that they are not really bad people, but what about my comment? Why didn't it show up? Why didn't I receive an apology, by mail at least? Isn't this the decent thing to do? Anyway, I'm both glad that the article was good enough to be used as reference, but I'm really disappointed due to the fact that I had to discover that my article was on another blog for about a year now without a clear reference to me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You shouldn't tolerate copying your contents. Just send a complaint to their host. They will shutdown them

Alaa Nassef said...

Well, this might seem simple, but since I did not copyright my material in a legitimate organization, there will be no way to shut down anybody. To prove that I'm the author of the content, it will be a lengthy procedure and a lot of legal actions, which is not worth it at all. I have no problem with someone copying my content, under two conditions. First, I should be notified. Second, I should be referenced in the copied content. The only case where the first condition could fall is when I'm being quoted. Nobody should notify me for using a couple of sentences from my content, but a reference to where they were taken from should be there.