Voice of the DBA

Tag: copyright

  • Sharing Code

    Sharing of Ideas

    It seems that almost every week I encounter some form of plagiarism it the SQL Server community. Whether its from SQLServerCentral or it’s someone else, it seems that I’m either alerting someone or sending my own takedown notice.  It’s a little sad that I have to even explain the morality of re-publishing someone’s else’s content without giving them credit to anyone over 8 years old, but apparently I do. However this isn’t a piece about plagiarism.

    I have seen people take various additional steps to protect their content, and that’s fine. It’s their right, and I understand that some people derive a level of income from their work. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it doesn’t matter. If someone wants to protect their work and they don’t want you to reuse it, then respect their wishes. If not for legal reasons, for moral ones.

    As we publish information on the web, however, I would think most of us hope our code and ideas are adapted and re-used. Not used in another publishing piece (blog, article, etc.), but used in a piece of production code that makes a system run better. I know when I’ve published code that helps someone track backups or monitor their servers, I was quite honored to hear that someone used my code in their system.

    Sometimes I wonder if  other authors out there feel the same way. Do writers assume their code will be rewritten by someone before it is used. Digital rights and intellectual property are immature fields, and I’m not sure how we ought to best handle the re-use of code. Authors have the right to decide how they want their works to be shared, and should publish their decision. I would hope that others out there would respect that.

    Steve Jones

    (originally published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72245/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Copyright

    This is actually amazing. A talk on what YouTube does with copyright and how they view it, from TED. It’s interesting, and there are two things in there to watch. Note, that I caught this link from Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror) on his blog.

    The first thing is that YouTube scans over 100 years of video every day. 100 years! That’s freaking amazing. That is an incredible amount of video processing that’s taking place, and a low of power being spent to enforce copyright. Forget about the legal issues for a minute and think about the technology. That is just amazing.

    The second thing in the talk is that content owners can, and are choosing, to not block this content, but rather use it to generate some benefits from them. They ought to be able to receive some benefits, and I agree, but knocking down some kid’s video because he used a copyrighted song seems silly. Especially as in the case of the wedding video, you never know what will go viral and what benefits you’ll get. Including selling more copies of your stuff.

    However the thing that worries me is that we are now not looking out for Fair Use. If a copyright holder wants to block their content, can we still get our 30sec of use of it in a video we make? Or a mashup?

    7231[1] The copyright office doesn’t necessarily define the fair use guidelines, but I think they need to. We ought to have some idea of what portion of audio, video, imagery, and text can be used, with citation. Even with automatic citation, that may benefit the copyright holder.

    We publish books here through Simple Talk Publishing. We typically offer books for free as marketing materials here on the site, and also sell them on Amazon and other retailers. Regularly I find these republished, or even for sale, on the Internet on other sites. I understand people wanting to share, but ultimately it’s a problem for us if all our books become too widely distributed for free. I know there are a lot of debates on piracy, and I’m not completely sure where I stand. I don’t actively worry about piracy, but I do act to have things removed when I find it.

    We need to do something here to both protect the copyright holders, but also allow people to reuse ideas and build on them. I certainly wouldn’t mind someone republishing portions of my work, or building their own knowledge publications based on it, just don’t wholesale copy what I’ve done without giving me any credit.

    I think YouTube has a good balance here, though I’d like to see more efforts from content owners to share and allow others to build on their work.