One of the things people who have sites have to deal with is people that reprint their content, whether it be text or images without permission. It’s a common problem on the Net and it’s something you may or may not have to deal with. See, what you say or do on the Net is yours, you and you alone have all the copyrights to what you do. As long as you don’t violate someone else’s rights while you do it, of course.

People have been reproducing the works of others without permission way before the Web existed; the web just made it easier for people to do so.

So how does one handle the situation when you find out that someone’s reposting your stuff (whether it be graphics or posts)? There are many, many ways to handle the matter.

In fact I had to just yesterday when I found my work being used without my permission on another site. On Feb. 2nd of this year, I posted an article about how I felt on the Academy snubbing both the Star Trek and Avatar actors as soon as I heard about it. The post was titled Academy Snubs Star Trek and Avatar Actors! I used a clever graphic (well I think it was) to accompany my blatherings and wouldn’t you know it, someone else thought it was clever too. And used it, without my permission.

Some people go absolutely bonkers when this occurs and usually rant, rave, foam at the mouth and go berserk on the individual committing the transgression. Which to me, is equally rude and quite unnecessary. You don’t know if someone didn’t know the stuff was yours or had a right to use it so why automatically assume the person is a lowlife, thieving, little weasel? That’s not fair or right.

When I found out that my DENIED graphic was used and by whom, I went to the person’s site and left him a nice comment about his piece which he recently wrote about the Star Trek actors being snubbed by the Oscars. See, great minds do think alike. Seriously. I totally agree with the dude and personally thought he has a really nice looking site.

I told him this in the comment and also let him know that he was using my DENIED graphic. I politely let him know it was totally cool for him to continue to use the image as long as he was kind enough to provide a Courtesy of Navarino Unincorporated link under the image and totally left it up to him on what to do.

He may or may not have known that the image was not his to use; I didn’t know one way or the other but was not pissed in the slightest to see someone else liked what I had done and wanted to use it too. A few hours later my image was taken down and another one put in it’s place.

Fine by me, no hard feelings and everything is right as rain. As a matter of fact I liked his site so much I’m definitely going back and reading his thoughts on movies and television from time to time. If it wasn’t for my DENIED graphic being used I wouldn’t have found his site! And I’m being serious here, really in the future you just might see me pointing you guys his way. So far I truly like what I have read there.

I love a happy ending. Don’t you?

PS. I just figured out that after yesterday’s post I hit the milestone of only having 300 Geek Worthy posts to go in my year-long challenge! 299 now…