notices intact, stealing? Absolutely, if the mirror owner does not have (and never even asked for) permission.

care? *Especially* if the reprint, republish, distribution, whatever cites me? If my goal is to promote knowledge and understanding, then the more places it appears, the better. The only reason I can see that I'd want to restrict distribution would be that I'm promoting my own ego. Two reasons, neither related to my ego. :) First, as many cctalkers know, I * do * intend to include this work as part of a for-profit book. That is why my agent advised me to remove it from my personal web site in the first place. Second, re: the reality of lax online citation standards, I know this all TOO well -- and I know that people will write, "'Blah blah blah,' the web site Iranianpda.com said." It's nothing to do with ego; quite frankly (and I know this is VERY controversial, I * fully agree * with Bill Gates' infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in which he noted that one's I.P. is just as legitimate "work" that should not be copied without permission or an exchange of money. What some call mirroring, others call stealing.

Jim Leonard wrote: I *do* know a couple of people who speak Persian, so I'll ask them if there's any reference to the page's provenance on the site. Chances are there's a line somewhere saying "We emailed the author about it but it bounced/he didn't reply/the email provider is long gone so presumably it's okay", just as you do on a ton of English-language sites. I do find myself wondering had been on http://israelipda.com with all the supporting text in Hebrew, if there would have been such a screaming about it ;-) Gordon

Evan Koblentz wrote: My $0.02: If I provided the content for free, never charged for the content, never intended to charge for the content, and someone else copies the content and puts it online with all authorship notices intact, I don't consider that stealing. If anything, I consider it good archival practice and a bit of flattery. If this were a commercial work then I would obviously see it differently. But you'll excuse me if I'm having trouble seeing it from your perspective, as someone who has made many personal works available for free under various licenses (opencontent, creative commons, public domain, commercial use only). -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

In my experience, it is a lawyer that can help; since it is an Iranian website that is offending, that makes it more difficult. Two experiences: I had provided the draft of a novel to a fellow author for his suggestions and general review. It was clearly under my copyright, both implicit (post 1976) and the standard copyright notice was in it. I didn't have a publisher for it. And to my shock and anger, I found this novel chopped up and serialized in a tabloid publication. I considered a lawyer but the expense of going against the tabloid was excessive. All I could do was to write and protest, with demonstration of my original authorship. The publication of the serial was ended by the tabloid before the story ended - but with no explanation and no attribution to me. The perpetrator of the fraud never said a word to me in response to demands that he admit his theft and pay me for my work. I considered this a half-victory. OTOH, my late friend Dona Meilach had written a book titled "The Best Bagels Are Made At Home" (among her 75+ books), and I had done beta-testing of her recipes. I later saw her recipes being published on a USENET cooking forum and told her about it. Her publisher and their lawyers tracked down the poster and issued a cease and desist request - which was complied with. But the key here was having a publisher who understood that the ECONOMIC interests of themselves and their author were being compromised. I consider that a three-quarter victory. Somewhere out there her recipes are available, as is her book (though I don't think in current publication). Intellectual property must be defended but it is a very difficult and expensive thing, as lawyers are required to obtain full satisfaction. In your case even that would be unlikely. I think the best you can do is to write to the Iranian site and demand that they provide adequate attribution - whatever that is. Don't hesitate because of the language difference - obviously they read English and can communicate in English. We are on both sides of the intellectual property issue in the classic computer field, with so much of the software that runs our machines in limbo legally. Good fortune. Vern Wright --- On Sun, 2/22/09, Evan Koblentz <evan at snarc.net> wrote:

Evan Koblentz wrote: Perhaps this is what prompted the mirror to take place . Maybe they're a fan of yours and saw a useful resource go off line, but had a copy of it and decided to bring it back online as a service to others who are interested in PDA's. After all that site seems to be about PDA's. Perhaps if your stuff was still up, they'd just put a link to your articles instead of mirroring them. And from the looks of it, it is a mirror - as the "Back to home page" leads back to your site, not theirs. That's the thing about the internet, once you release something, it may as well be up forever. If archive.org didn't grab it, someone else might have. If you don't want it published, don't release it. Once it's out there, it's not easy to get it back. Is there some reason your agent doesn't want parts of your book, which you've previously published to be out there? Some authors consider this a free demo as to the contents of the book, and it can infact be useful to leave it out there so that it attracts readers. Might that be a better way to deal with this? Perhaps list it as a sample chapter, or section? If you look at folklore.org, Andy Hertzfeld's site about the creation of the Mac, you'll find he's got a book called Revolution in the Valley, however that book contains all its contents from his website. If anything, the stories on the website drive book sales. You can't put a website on your book shelf, but that's what the book is. And you can't discuss the stories in the book with anyone in the world, but that's what the website provides. And if anything, people may be googling about Macintosh history or Andy, and not know he's got folklore.org, and not know he's got a book, but as soon as they find the website, they'll find the book and probably order it. Other examples: Joel Spolski's writings, Paul Graham's writings. Both have books of technical stuff they've released on their websites, and both have had great sales. I could also point at Cory Doctorow who gives away copies of his scifi books in every conceivable format (txt, rtf, pdf, etc.) and released them with creative commons licenses that allow you to make and share copies, and even he even used his own podcast to read his own scifi books for his readers. Yet, he finds that all this drives sales up, not down. For almost ALL of the examples above, nearly all stuff that's in their books is available for reading online, but I bought their books anyway, even though I could have just read it online and given up on any parts not on the internet. So, having parts of your book online is going to the exact opposite of preventing sales. The parts that aren't online, if anything, will serve as incentive to get people to buy the whole book. Please share those thoughts with your agent and publishers, you might not be able to convince them, but you'll be more likely to drive sales of your book that way, especially if set it up so that every article that's on your web page points to an Amazon (or other bookstore) link, and you put up notices that says something like "You'll find this article and even more like them in my book, follow this link to order it." So instead of your articles serving to promote your book, they now serve to promote that Iranian PDA site. Seems to me that your Agent needs to be spanked for misleading you. All that said, it's far better to have your own on your own site than to be mirrored by someone else, even if they're a fan, because of the other reasons you've cited. Have you contacted that website's owner and asked them to remove it? whois shows register at parsadata.net as a possible contact for that domain, or at least the registrar. view source on their main page shows: http://www.iranianPDA.com/contact/index.asp as a possible contact form. You'll have to figure out what the fields on the forms are as they're not at all in English. HTML source seems to say that from the top they are txtName (presumably human readable name), grade (??), phone, email address, address (maybe it's the same as the email for confirmation?), address (?), subject, and message. buttons are submit, reset, and cancel. There's some java script at the top that seems to validate input on email addresses, so that'll work in your favor if you enter the email address in the wrong field.

On 24 Feb 2009 at 9:48, Vernon Wright wrote: And I didn't say that Iran or its citizens were bad. I merely stated that it was not a signatory to any IP convention and did not have a legal structure that gave foreigners standing in IP matters. So Evan's legal remedies are pretty much non-existent. Evan can requrest away, but the website owner has no legal obligation to respect his wishes. Cheers, Chuck