Thursday, April 7, 2011

Copyrights

Since I'm very vain, I regularly check the stats for this blog.  The most popular landing page is the Wawa locations post.  It is followed closely by the various essays for school that I posted here.  Today, I noticed that someone came into my essay on service learning by searching for the first line.  I know this is standard practice to see if something is copied from elsewhere.  I wondered if my paper had appeared somewhere else and someone was searching for the original.  Sure enough, that same Google search shows my blog as well as another site with my paper.  That site gives a few paragraph sample and is selling it for $15.  I'm not sure how I feel about it receiving a rating of only 4 out of 7 or "Stronger Essays".  Although, in my defense, that essay was written under a time limit.  I was a bit disappointed they only stole that one essay and not my term paper, which I feel was better written.  I guess service learning is a more popular topic among plagiarizing college students students wishing to "learn by seeing a well-written example".

I thought briefly about contacting them and telling them to take it down, but A I don't think they'd listen, B I'm too lazy to care and C it's somewhat comforting that many people will find the essay on that site but just get it for free from my blog.  That being said, let me be clear that I don't consent to it being there, to preserve my legal right to sue them when they make it so that you can file lawsuits without ever putting on pants.  If I use the RIAA's method of calculating damages, and since those first few paragraphs are just as copyrighted as the rest, they owe me $150,000 for each page view.

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