Hi,

I’m the original author of this post, which, ironically, has been reproduced here without my permission.

I realise Sarah has done this with the best of intentions, and am very flattered that she wanted to share the entry with the forum. However, you CANNOT just take another writer’s work and republish it anywhere you like. I originally wrote the post above to complain about the practice of people copying entire posts from my website and republishing them elsewhere. By copying the entire text of that post and publishing it here, Sarah has done exactly the same thing.

I’m not going to make a big deal out of it because, as I said, I realise she doesn’t mean any harm by doing this.  As this is a forum for writers, though, I felt I needed to point out that you really can't just take another writer’s work and republish it without their permission - even if you're doing it with good intentions.

Sarah, I'm sorry I had to post this here, but I emailed you about this a few days ago now, and haven't had a response. Again, I'm flattered that you liked my post, and have no problem with you linking to it on this forum, but I would really appreciate it if you could refrain from posting my work elsewhere.  Thank you.

Amber

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for removing the copyrighted material.

The person I was complaining about in my original post did publish my writing without any credit, however, even if you do credit the material to me and provide a link (which you did), it's still an infringement of my copyright.  Basically, no one is allowed to reproduce my (or any author's) work without my permission. There's an article on copyright theft here which you may find helpful:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3032

In answer to your question about giving my work a wider audience: yes, obviously, any writer is happy for their work to be read. Most of us also write for money, though, and if everyone just copied our articles and republished them anywhere they wanted to, it would become very difficult for writers like me to make a living from writing. No one will come to my site if they're able to read the content on forums and other sites, which is why it's fine to link to an article, but not OK to reproduce it without permission.

Thanks again for your understanding, and for the link to my site.
Amber

Hi,

It is a very complicated area, so don't worry, you're not the first person to think it was OK to reproduce something, and I do realise that you did it with the best of intentions!

In regard to letters: basically if someone sends you a letter, you own the physical letter, but they still own the copyright to the words they've written. So, no, you can't publish it. What you can do is paraphrase it, or publish an article/post explaining what the letter said - you're just not allowed to use the actual text that someone else has written.

Hope this helps.
Amber

Yeah, I agree with Amber.
With the increasing role of personal blogs and the quality of blog writing, publishers can publish newspapers, magazines and even books using the materials from blogs.
I hope this won't happen