Possibly one of the most wonderful things about the internet is that anyone with a computer and an ISP can go online whenever they have the urge and find information on a variety of topics ranging from how to repair your car to how to care for your pet. Among the vast assortment, as sites such as this one stand as an example of, are the occult and mysticism pages that are readily available to anyone from any religious background or belief system. With a few seconds of typing and clicks, a person can arrive here at Ars Falcis to read what is available on the art of necromancy. Information on this art is somewhat scarce, but some people such as myself have taken the time to write what they can to attempt to relate what they can about necromancy and the occult.

However, as a serious downside to this modern marvel, is the idiotic habit of some people of deciding that they want a website too and, instead of writing the information themselves (with all the difficulties that entails) they feel compelled to go to somebody else's site, copy some or all of the information without second thought, and blithely putting it up on their own site. Some plagiarists (as that is what they are) are courteous enough to even put up a citation which indicates where they stole the information from but fail to realize that, even with a citation, theft is theft.

It never ceases to amaze me how some individuals find the need to take someone else's work and pretend it is their own. It's not only a dishonest and intellectually lazy practise, but it also shows a lack of knowledge and skill on the part of the plagiarist. For those who do not know what defines a plagiarist, a short and unofficial connotative definition is, “one who copies the work of a person or group of people and represents it without the permission of the original author(s).” This means people who copy pages or segments of pages from Ars Falcis and post it on a forum, on another website, in a book, on a blog, in a LiveJournal, or whatever other medium that is not actually directly from this site. This particular breed of internet disease who steals the work of others is ignorantly responsible for so much of the relocation and removal of websites that it sincerely causes me to stop in awe of the depths to which people will stoop in an attempt to artificially achieve something meaningful with their otherwise worthless intellects.

For example, I'm reminded of a site page, “Dictionary of Demons” which was originally written by Stephanie Connolly. I was fortunate enough to be able to talk to her spuratically a few years ago when she still had the information on her own site with her own copyright information and appendments to the information presented. She put a good deal of effort into the creation of that page and, good or bad, it was hers and not meant to be trifled with. I was utterly dismayed at the difficulty she encountered when people caught wind of the wonderful work she had created, not because I do not want people to read good material but rather because the publicity quickly devolved into a feed frenzy for ingrates. Within a matter of months the Vault was taken offline permanently because of her utter frustration with the irresponsible behaviour of a few individuals who believed it their sovereign right to steal her work and turn it into some kind of perverse abomination by repasting on half-baked Geocities wicca sites, game sites, occult forums, and other such notoriously awful mediums.

This is not a unique circumstance. Another example of this same kind of e-piracy is Melissa Crowe's work on “Myriad of Enchantments.” A well-educated and sophisticated young woman by all accounts, her work has been ruthlessly and shamelessly stolen by all sorts of kids with keyboards who thought it would be cool to have something as good as her work on their own site.

This brings me to the current dilemma with Ars Falcis, and with The Library of Knowledge. Ars Falcis represents many hours of reading, cross-referencing, and relation of ideas and philosophies developed over many years of practise and consultation with other practitioners. Ars Falcis is not meant to appear anywhere else but here, nor is The Library of Knowledge meant to be seen anywhere except on its allotted space. Still, some people don't understand this and insist on replicating material which is not their own for the sake of getting more traffic, bolstering their lacking material, or gaining some kind of personal ego boost from friends who have not yet discovered the lacking potential of the plagiarist.

But it doesn't hurt anyone! Why can't I just put it up on my site? (dur...)

There are a few reasons this should not be done. The biggest one is that the original author may want to make amendments to the material at some later date. Few texts ever come out perfect the first time. Because mistakes may linger, and because internet pages can be so readily altered, an author may wish to make a spelling correction, amend a factual or grammatical error, or simply redesign entire paragraphs or pages because of new information that has become available to them. If there are sources scattered halfway across the globe on servers that do not allow the original author to change the content, the quality of the material degrades further and further with time. Even if access was allowed, it is unfair to burden an author with the duty of hunting down each individual page that wanted to steal his or her work and manually fix each and ever individual instance of an error.

Secondly, there are very few people who ask for permission to relocate information. In their haste, context is often lost and texts become distorted because they are no longer presented alongside the information originally intended to buffer one fact with another.

Thirdly, it may in fact be illegal to copy the information if the author has created a copyright for their information prior to making it available on the internet. Believe it or not, not everything you find on the net is public domain. In fact, according to the laws of many areas, information is presumed copyrighted upon creation even if the author takes no action whatsoever toward securing an official copyright. This can lead to royalty or damages fines that the author can bring down on plagiarists.

So what do I do instead?

The proper way to show people a good site is to create a link back to the original information in the format <a href=”http://www.whatiscopyright.org”>http://www.whatiscopyright.org/</a>. This links people directly to the appropriate site without having infringed on anyone's rights or having copied so much as a single sentence of anyone else's work.

The second way to do this is to create an excerpt, like Google does, which contains only a small snippet of the original text to prompt readers to look at the source on their own. Small excerpts and short quotations are considered “Fair Use”, legally speaking, and are considered appropriate in academic terms as well. The only provision to using this method is that one must also name the original author and where the information was originally found in the form of a link and a website title..

The third option is simply to ask the author if you can copy their information. No response is assumed to be a no. A yes means that you can copy what they said you can copy, but you still have to include “reprinted with permission” on the page and also include where the information was found (like http://www23.brinkster.com/falcis/), in what source (the title, like “Ars Falcis”), and who the original author was (as in “Tomekeeper”; aliases do count. Consider Samuel Clemens' use of “Mark Twain”, for example.)