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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: Russell McOrmond <russell_-at-_flora.ca>
To: flora-admin-help_-at-_flora.org
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 10:32:48 -0400 (EDT)
I am forwarding this letter from Rosaleen Dickson that is a story about
a situation that recently happened. Only slightly edited, mostly putting
spaces around URL's so that the archiving system will properly make them
into links.
As someone who works with volunteers I know quite well that for work
people are doing for free, attribution and recognition is very important.
This is why I believe that protection the moral rights of volunteer
creators, especially on free/libre and free/gratis sites like FLORA.org,
is so important!
When Rosaleen told me of the other site I very much encouraged her to
contact them, and provided whatever research I could as I know how I would
feel if my stuff had been copied without attribution as her work had.
Note: I got a copy (in paper) of the Handbook on Creators' Rights when I
attended the Creators' Rights Alliance AGM last week
<http://www.digital-copyright.ca/discuss/1888>. I will try to find out if
there is an electronic copy of this booklet that can be made available as
it explains moral rights and other issues quite well (although I wish
there was more on digital issues, but I'm working on/with them ;-).
---
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
Governance software that controls ICT, automates government policy, or
electronically counts votes, shouldn't be bought any more than
politicians should be bought. -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 00:04:10 -0400
From: Rosaleen Dickson
To: Russell McOrmond
Subject: Re: Guess what??? The whole boring story!
The saga of "Ask Great Granny" . . .
For the past eight years I have been writing answers to letters I receive
from people with family problems of every conceivable kind. It all started
as one very popular part of a magnificent Seniors Computer Information
Project (SCIP) set up in Winnipeg by an imaginative social worker, Richard
Denesiuk. The letters came to him, he forwarded them to me in Ottawa, and
I sent him the answers which he then posted to the SCIP Web site by a
volunteer somewhere else.
Over the years we built up a huge archive of letters and answers, which
were sorted into categories and made available on the Web site where they
still are. Eventually the archive became very long, also the volunteer who
had been sorting and posting them had to quit, so we stopped saving them.
We posted my home e-mail address in the Ask Great Granny site and letters
came straight to me. To this day they still come, from across Canada, the
entire United States, and also Australia, UK, and other places such as
India! I answer them all. Meanwhile, the entire archive of previous
letters is still available at http://www.seniorscan.ca/granny/granny.html
and people constantly refer to those letters.
My answers, by the way, are not solutions to their problems but just
careful discussions of possibilities to help them think through for
themselves. I get lots of letters telling me the service I provide is very
helpful.
Then last week, by complete surprise, a friend asked me if I knew that
there was another Ask Great Granny on the Internet so I searched on
Google, only to find that someone had copied our entire archive of letters
and answers and had made another Web site at
http://www.ask-great-granny.com/ with a new heading and a picture of a
Dutch type Great Granny, but using all my material, categorized lists of
headings, letters, answers and all. Nowhere was there any mention that it
was my work and there was also no way for a person to contact the person
who had built this new Web site with all my material.
I tried various ways to contact the people who had stolen that huge file
of my material and was posting it unattributed, but I couldn't find who
they were. I tried to get them through the Whois system at
http://www.openconcept.ca/whois.php?q=ask-great-granny.com , found a Sarah
West at LORDMONTY@TOTALISE.CO.UK but couldn't get her to answer my letter.
Then I wrote to TuCows who were mentioned in the Whois list and they
couldn't help me. Then I wrote to domains@fasthosts.co.uk and also filled
in a "contact us" form to someone who seemed to be hosting the server at
http://manage.scservers.com/site/index.cgi and I finally got e-mail from
Mike Gifford <mike@openconcept.ca> telling me he thought whoever had
stolen my material had finally added an attribution.
The letter I sent them was not angry, just said the following:
To whom it may concern:
I am the author of several hundred letters in a series called Ask
Great Granny all of which have been copied to another Web site
without attribution.
I am not seeking payment for this material, simply attribution.
The person who is using my material should have my name on it as
author.
My original material is all on
http://www.seniorscan.ca/granny/granny.html
The stolen material is all on http://www.ask-great-granny.com/
Please have my name added to that Web site.
Thank you,
Rosaleen Dickson
http://www.flora.org/rosaleen/
Today I looked up that clone of my Ask Great Granny Web site at
http://www.ask-great-granny.com/ and find that they have added
this line: "By the talented Rosaleen Dickson"
I still have not heard from them so I have no idea whose idea it was to
lift those hundreds of letters and stash them away under their strange new
heading. Calling me "talented" is probably their way of getting off the
hook, but I find it patronizing and would appreciate an apology.
I don't know what suddenly got them to attribute the material to me -
maybe it was the note I sent to one of them, I forget which one, saying my
friends had advised me to get a copyright lawyer but I didn't feel like
taking it that far yet. Perhaps the "yet" moved them to add that line.
That line which they just added is linked to my own personal family site,
one of Flora's earliest, instead of to the original Ask Great Granny site
which is an integral part of Richard Denesiuk's great interactive Web site
at http://www.seniorscan.ca
And that's the end of that story. Today, as every day, I received a few
more letters to Great Granny and answered them and trashed the letters AND
my answers. It continues to be a very useful social service, one of my
several volunteer projects, on and off the Internet.
Cheers,
Rosaleen Dickson
http://www.flora.org/rosaleen/
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