Intellectual Property Theft?
Looking through the OdeToCode weblogs for the past week, I noticed that we have been getting referrals to some articles from a site called SSWUG (SQL Server Wordwide Users Group). This is something I consider a good thing - we write articles for the developer community and feel good when other sites, blogs, newsgroups link to them. Out of curiosity however I browsed over to the SSWUG site to check them out and see in what context they were linking to our articles - http://www.sswug.com/see/19274 or http://www.sswug.org/see/19275
It seems that SSWUG is a membership site. To view the OdeToCode articles, you need not only to register on their site, but need to pay a membership fee. Does anyone else think this is unethical?
To lift an article from another website, without informing us, let alone asking, put up a teaser abstract, but to ‘Read this article…’, I need to register and pay a membership!!!!!! In this case Scott and I wrote these articles, and we choose to share them with the developer community – FREE. It’s our way of giving back, to this community.
It makes me wonder, how many o the 16556 Articles/Summary or 470 Scripts on this site have been “stolen“? How many other ‘reputable’ websites do this sort of thing? What is the difference between theft and what SSWUG is doing?