MUDGE’S Musings
Constant reader of this nanocorner of the ‘sphere hasn’t had a long time to make this a habit. mm001 dates all the way back to the first week of May.
Guess the point is, MUDGE is quite new to this blogging thing, quite low on the learning curve as it were, and quite surprised that anyone beyond a small coterie of similarly inclined hobbyists even were aware of the existence of Left-Handed Complement.
Today, however, I was called to account for what probably should be classified as a rookie mistake.
Received a polite letter from Salon.com, asking me to remove the article that I posted a couple of days ago, as its reprint in full represents a potential violation of copyright.
Hi there.
I’m Walter Thompson, director of marketing for Salon.com. It’s come to our attention that your site features the full text of at least one article originally published on Salon.com. The original article may be found here.
The article appears in full on your Web site here.
Although posting an excerpt of copyrighted material is acceptable, republishing a work in full that’s owned by another party is a copyright violation. Please remove this material from your site at your earliest opportunity.
If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line.
Thanks,
— Walter.
—
Walter Thompson
Director, Marketing
Salon Media Group, Inc.
101 Spear Street
Suite 203
San Francisco, CA 94105
walter@salon.com <mailto:walter@salon.com>
Guess my wide readership (Lifetime: 1,178 hits overall as of 20:45pmCDT on 27-July-2007) is just too scary for Salon.com. And I hope I haven’t just compounded the violation by printing Walter’s letter in full!
But, MUDGE always intends to do the right thing, so here’s what mm084 looks like now, in part:
Lesson learned.
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
Left-handed Complement 
The hell with Salon! Although they are correct concerning copy write law, it’s stupid of them to insist you remove an article that is in wide distribution already.
An easy way around this is to excerpt an article, then provide a link to the original page. That’s what they really want, a link to their page so that anyone that wants to read the article has to see their ads too…
Don’t feel too bad Mudge, it’s all about the money for these idiots in the MSM.
The scientifically impossible I do right away
The spiritually miraculous takes a bit longer
Thanks for the consoling words, ClapSo.
I must admit that this incident has put a hitch in my delivery. Sigh.
–MUDGE
[…] fact, one such column was especially popular with Salon’s lawyers, as this then newbie was called to account for exceeding the amount of quoted text allowed by their […]