Monday 29 June 2009

Salzberg Lament



This gorgeous picture of Salzberg is by MatthiasKabel at Wikimedia Commons.

I sometimes try to find out what’s happened to articles I post at Constant Content. If they’ve sold for usage rights only, I need to make sure the buyers have played by the rules. They should have included my byline and not have changed anything, and they should only have used the piece once.

Sometimes, I also check out those that went for full rights, where I relinquish all rights to the article and the buyer can do as he pleases with it. It’s good when I find my byline has been used in those circumstances, usually it’s not, and sometimes another author passes my work off as his own. As long as she has paid the price, that’s not illegal.

But just occasionally I do feel a pang when I find that all my hard work has been attributed to someone else. That happened this morning when I googled the first paragraph of my article about Salzberg. It has been syndicated to and from several article sites, mostly with the byline of another author. Since he paid a fair price for it, I won’t link to a page with his name on it, but this one doesn’t. It’s also a travel guide site, so I’m sure they’ll be happy about the link.

PS Oops. Just clicked on my link and found they've added the author's name so I've decided to remove it. Sorry.

4 comments:

Jena Isle said...

This is awesome Jean..Wow..Very peaceful and conducive to writing. Thanks for sharing.

Get Listed in Google said...

Beautiful pictures!

<3 Lindsay

Unknown said...

Thanks Jena and GLiG.

jan geronimo said...

That's gorgeous picture all right.

I can understand how you feel about your writing appearing under someone else's name. Not because I have a similar experience. I react because every writing takes something precious within is. It has our personal stamp, our personality. If it were living thing, it's even reasonable to assume it's got our DNA.

But of course we do what we have to do. That's the reality of writing for the web. It's just taking some getting used seeing our children appropriated as somebody else's children.

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