The web continues to suffer from theft of property, and people outside
the reach of U.S. Intellectual property laws continue to steal with free
abandon. It's not just the random web page, overseas thief's are stealing
entire Oracle Press books, entire web sites, and in the most gutsy move yet,
scumbags are stealing other Oracle professionals conference proceedings, and
giving them as their own.
Every week, someone steals my web pages. This site below copied by
whole remote DBA offering, copyrighted my work in their name, and it even says that I
manage their company! Every sentence (even the illustration) is copied
from my work.
"Angtech remote DBA is managed by Donald K. Burleson, one of the world’s
leading Oracle consultants and authors”
I monitor my thefts daily using Copyscape
and Turnitin, and hardly a day goes by
when some foreigner is not hanging pages from my own work, copyrighting it as
their own. The
protection of the DMCA does not extend overseas, and chasing-down web
criminals can be expensive and problematic, as I note in my book "Web Stalkers".
Last year I had someone give one of my Oracle Openworld presentations at a
local user group, changing only the cover slide! When confronted, they
claimed that they thought that it was OK to steal the works of others and put
their own name on it. The guy sounded as dumb as a bag of hammers, and I
believed him. I also had a McGraw-Hill author cut and paste my work directly
into a book.
Almost every month, I find someone selling a stolen electronic copy of
one of my Oracle Press books on eBay or a Chinese/Russian download site.
It's a sad reality that
they can do this with impunity.
I once caught a fellow selling a stolen
ebook of mine on eBay, and the police or FBI did nothing! The crooks know
that they can steal with impunity and they are getting bolder and bolder.
Here are my notes on the futility of
detecting and preventing plagiarism.
- Dr. Tim Hall - Dr, Hall notes that Ankit Patel
stole
his entire web site, changing only the the name from Dr. Tim Hall to Dr.
Ankit Patel, even creating a fake resume with Dr. Hall's credentials.
Read Dr. Halls note
Plagiarism in the worst possible way.
-
Dr. Bert Scalzo
- Bert tells of a foreigner who stole his work to get accepted to a major
Oracle conference in 2006, using his stolen abstract and PowerPoint!
Dr. Scalzo was able to alert the conference staff and have the thief banned,
but the crook got precariously close to pulling-off a major fraud.
-
Lutz Hartmann - I don't care for the unsavory practices of the fake
users group, SSWUG and their
Hoover scam.
I'm not alone. Oracle ACE Lutz Hartmann was a
victim of SSWUG, and posted his outrage that having his work taken for a
profit-making scheme:
"I cannot believe it! I just found a link to my article about
flashback any error in oracle 10gR2 on the web.
It leads you to the site of the so called “SQL Server Worldwide
Usergroup”. There you can pay to have access to my article, which
you of course can access for free an my blog."
-
Doug Burns
- Mr. Burns charged Oracle book author and RAC SIG chairman Murali Vallath
with stealing from his Oracle OpenWorld presentation and presenting it as
his original work.
-
Jon Emmons
- Emmons, owner of the most popular Oracle blog "Life
After Coffee", notes that Wikipedia has become a major clearing house for
plagiarism:
"I think it’s unlikely that Wikipedia is actively trying to pollute
the web. Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed for many of the reasons you
mention but it remains accurate on many topics.
There is no disguising of what it is and it has been largely condemned
as an academic resource"
If the web host is located in the USA then the
hosting company is bound by the
Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. §§ 512, 1201-1205, 1301-1332; 28 U.S.C. § 4001) and
all United States web service providers are required not to facilitate in the
publication of infringing material.
Unfortunately, there are no protections outside the USA, and the bad guys
appear to be winning.
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