Copies!

I recently moaned about a copy of an article from The Global FlyFisher, and actually managed to get the webmaster to remove the copy from his web site.

Well, I'm on it again!

This time with an oldtimer in the "Just-grab-it-from-GFF" game: the knots. For some reason our knot drawings are extremely popular, and have been copied so many times that I have given up counting.

A few days ago I needed some supplementary information about knot strengths, and did a Google search. And lo and behold! The first hit confirmed what I thought. No surprise, actually, because the text was a slightly modified copy of my text in our knot section. And the drawings were copied too. Just lifted off our site, mirrored and rotated a bit and the republished with somebody else's copyright.

Man, do I hate that!

I spent and still spend hours, days, weeks and months on creating original material on this site, and it p*sses me off (pardon my French!) to see others just using it—and without asking!

And a quick search on the web just a minute ago produced these:

An Italian page, images inversed, but they are the same. I'll bet you the text is a translation too...
·www.pescatorimoscalodi.it/A.B.C/IN%20PRATICA/
  I%20NODI/I%20NODI.htm (seen to the right here)

A US bass page. All images mirrored and rotated, but sure enough our's
·www.hawghunter.net/fishknots.html

A few drawings copied directly to these sites
·www.shrimpin.com/knots.htm

Even the Australians like us
·www.flex.com.au/~kes086/tips.html

Many drawings scaled and skewed, but the originals are our's
·www.isaa.cc/shrimpandfish/knowledgebase/
  fishing_knots.php

This Florida page uses the same ugly copies
·users.mfi.net/scurry/fishing/tips.html

This boat homepage uses a couple as link illustrations
·www.whyc.com/education/fishinglinks.htm

You won't get clickable links. I won't support these sites with incoming clicks. You must copy and paste if you want to visit.

I'm sure that if I spent just 10 more minutes searching for these drawings I could find plenty more examples.

Time and time over have I written to people like webmasters of the above sites and asked them to refer from posting copies of our stuff on their sites.
In the best cases things are removed with an apology. Mostly I'm just ignored, but in the worst cases people seem to find an attack the best defence, and we have been accused of having copied the drawings ourselves, and having no right to use them on our own site!

Well, we have now pasted a large and hard-to-remove copyright notice on top of all pictures and written this little piece, so we hope our hunt for illegal copies will be less succesful in the future.