Geoff Wiki

I'm writing this because a person on facebook made this statement:

“And which of Paul Michel's web sites did you steal this from?? At least an acknowledgment would be a minor courtesy from a thief!”

And later on the same thread,this:

“The entite post stolen from one of our local historians Paul Michel's web site Don't' give this crap-head (perhaps that should sheep-head) Hargie Ba Ba credit for this! A thief is a thief is a thief!”

And yet again:

“He? She? Ba Ba assumed human! I know Paul put many months of work researching Fogg's background and this ass-hole wants to take credit with no acknowledgement. A thief is a thief, never sighted in this group before and hopefully never again!”

And repeated with similar statements numerous other times

Before I go into the detail about this I would like to point out that I'm not defending anybodys actions. I'm just pointing out that copying something from somebody else's web page is NOT stealing and NOT theft.

Because to steal anything you have to deprive the owner of the thing, of it. See what I have written about theft

If somebody copies something from a website, they have a copy of it but the original if you want to call it that, still exists. Therefore the owner of the material on the website has not been deprived of it.

The coping of information from a website could be the infringement of somebody's copyright rights. These are rights that only exist because of copyright law. Copyright law is quite complicated. If you want to know more about it have a look at the webinar notes I created when I presented on that subject here

It is thought by some people that intellect can be owned. However it is only owned because of intellectual property laws. Without those laws the property would not exist. In my opinion the only reason that intellectual property laws now exist is to enable those with more to have even more. Originally copyright laws were created as a means of censorship.

See A one sided view on the history of Copyright

Again in my opinion, I don't believe anybody owns their own intellect. Because where did they get that intellect from.

All the combined intellect that came before them. From their parents ther teachers their mentors or whatever but they didn't get it completely themself. And even if they thought of something completely unique where do they get the inspiration from to do so, without the technology of language, society, science, nature and the like.

The accuser of the theft has no idea why the person copied the material. I'm pretty sure the copier did not do it for the purpose of financial gain or even recognition that they had created the material.

It's more likely they just copied it because they may not know how to link to it. Or even if they did they just wanted to disseminate the information to people they knew would benefit from it.

Because the accuser has used the words thief and stealing, it is possible that the copier is now too embarrassed to admit they may have made a mistake.