Giving credit where credit is due!

http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-plagiarism

You are at your office or school and you have been working on a really big project that includes pictures and reports, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.  You are just about finished with it and you walk away from your computer and one of your colleagues or fellow students walks up to your computer, takes their flash drive and downloads your project into it.  They go to their computer, bring up all the files, but they don’t change any of your data.  The one thing that they do change is the name on the project.  They take out your name and they put in theirs.  Wow!!! that’s stealing,….they are stealing your project, your ideas, your pictures!!  Stealing is illegal…they are plagiarizing you.  

I have been online surfing the web pretty much since the early stages of the internet…since 1993, so that is 20 years.  I made my first website about 15 years ago hosted by Geocities which is no longer around as Yahoo bought them up and they took down all the webpages that we made.  When I made my original site I found lots of cute little graphics to put on my page.  These graphics were made by artists free for us to use but with one stipulation.  Give a link back to them….give them credit!  A very simple task if you ask me.  I got free graphics and all I had to do was give a link back to the original artist.  Very easy isn’t it!!

Today there was an incident on Facebook where a woman had taken other food bloggers pictures and recipes and posted them as her own.  No link back to the original blogger.  One of my pictures was in her big bag of tricks!!!