Ttrimm
1
@ClarinetDude
just found a bunch of my articles that I wrote plagiarized there. No accreditation at all. One of them. http://ask.brothersoft.com/how-to-design-a-rope-coil-using-sketchup-242115.html
Ttrimm
3
The thing that concerns me is that Brother is a pretty big organization. I believe that this is their user forum, but they are setting the wrong example by allowing this. Those are wikiHow articles. Shoot, when he told me, I started to think that I screwed up! and then I remembered interpreting most of those articles from videos. Those were definitely my words.
^ Also I checked the date of the post in Brothersoft and it was AFTER Teresa had actually written her article so the only reasonable explanation was that someone had plagarised Teresa’s work…
system
5
All they’d have to do to be within the Creative Commons license would be to credit wikiHow.
system
6
Maniac
7
Another thing that might be worth doing would be to send the author (on Brothersoft) or whomever runs the website a link to wikiHow’s attribution requirements, so they know what they must do: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Attribution
and http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Creative-Commons
Ttrimm
8
Ok. Wasn’t sure what to do.
I just wrote them the following letter through the Contact Us page ( http://www.brothersoft.com/info/contact_us/
). It might be a good idea for multiple people within the wikiHow community to send letters like this: It has been brought to my attention that people using your forums have been copying wikiHow articles in their entirety without giving proper attribution. See the following: http://ask.brothersoft.com/how-to-design-a-rope-coil-using-sketchup-242115.html
http://ask.brothersoft.com/how-to-extend-the-floor-in-sketchyphysics-242525.html
This goes against wikiHow’s attribution requirements: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Attribution
Could you please moderate your forums to see that these articles are correctly attributed? This issue has already been brought up in the wikiHow forums and wikiHow staff may have to get involved if the attribution isn’t changed: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/3501/found-a-bunch-of-my-sketchup-articles-on-brothersoft
Thanks for your consideration. Best, Nicole Willson wikiHow volunteer editor and administrator
And pretty flagrantly violates the non-commercial provisions of the license, too.
It doesn’t even look like it was users who posted these. Look at the titles: it looks like they’re using some automated process to import the title of the articles and tweak them a little and post them as a “question” assigned to a fake username, then having another fake username answer them automatically. Pretty much the worst kind of Internet bottom-feeder; this kind of thing is why having “SEO” in a job title will endear someone to me roughly as much as “Freelance Cat Fucker”.
There’s nothing wikiHow’s staff can do. The authors of the article are the copyright holders, not wikiHow; in lieu of an actual copyright assignment
(rather than just granting the right for wikiHow to sublicense anything you write as the terms of use
provides) it’s dubious whether wikiHow-the-company would have any standing
in any legal action. The Righthaven case
would suggest that it would not. On the other hand, the original author, and only the original author
(Teresa in this case), would be able to file a DMCA notice with their upstream provider (Softlayer). Going to their upstream is the only option, since 1) Brothersoft doesn’t have a DMCA contact 2) it’s more than likely Brothersoft staff
who are responsible for the posting of these articles and thus disqualifying Brothersoft from using DMCA safe-harbour provisions even if they had a DMCA contact as the law requires. I’m not sure this is the right
thing to do, but it would be the effective one.
Ttrimm
11
Oh wow. I don’t even know what to say on this. There quite a few of them. Not just two.
I can’t believe that people would blatantly copy our authors’ work and not even in a small way attribute it to them. @Teresa
You should totally send ask.brothersoft a message considering you are the author of two of the plagarised articles…
system
13
@ttrimm
If you write a DMCA take down request as the copyright holder, that should do the trick: http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-DMCA-Take-Down-Request
I have a template you can modify if you need one, just let me know
Sadly this sort of thing happens to us all over the web.
We in the wikiHaus are getting a little better at asking folks to at least attribute us, but we still miss 99% of it. Sounds like lots folks have already contacted Brothersoft. But if they don’t take action on this in a few weeks can someone ping me or Chris. We can then ask again nicely. In the majority of cases we can get them to attribute us. Typically the more reputable sites will make the change out of courtesy without having to resort to DMCA take down notices.
And you’re not in a position to send DMCA notices anyway. Read what I said above. You have no standing, and if you claimed that standing, you would probably be implicitly taking responsibility for the material published on wikiHow, which would jeopardise wikiHow’s (as in the company’s) position as a service provider under the DMCA. (If you already have
done DMCA notices, then be aware that it is actually illegal to file a false DMCA notice, which is to say, a claim over material to which you do not hold the copyright.) The only position in a person to do that is the original author (Teresa, who is the only person who has a clear copyright claim over the material), and since the evidence is quite clear that they are not
a service provider under the DMCA (it looks like their own staff are responsible for creating spam articles), then there’s no choice but to go to their upstream, which is to say, SoftLayer.
system
16
Wow. How do you know all this information?
