Skyscript Astrology Forum

Some people ruthlessly rip of other people?s work on the web, to provide their own sites with informative content ? a ploy to attract visitors, by which they hope to gain customers or raise advertising revenue.

Some other, foolish people, believe that by circulating unauthorised reproductions of other authors? works on their own web sites, or in forum posts that are no more than plagiarised extracts, they have contributed to the accessibility of knowledge. This is often based on an insecure and selfish need to get ?thank you for your wonderful effort? type remarks from other foolish people - who might have appreciated the effort that the original author took and recognised the intellectual theft for what it was. Whenever this happens, it makes good astrological authors less likely to place their work on the web, where it might be plagiarised or easily copied with a thin smear of alteration to be reproduced under someone else?s name.

So I am starting this thread as a place to name and shame some of the websites that are particular bad for doing this, and which are posing a threat to the future publication of good astrological information on the web. Hopefully, if they realise that they will generate negative rather than positive reaction from this activity, they will be less likely to do it in the future. Then more good authors will see the web as a safe place to expose their work for public benefit, without their claim to credibility being undermined. I?ll start this thread today with one site that has no excuse for its illegal content, and which offers a demonstration of how this activity quickly spreads from one impingement on the author?s right, to a situation that gets totally out of hand.

I would love to see the day when scholarly and informative articles that are published via the web are considered every bit as worthy as those delivered by print. For this to happen we all need to become more intolerant of shameful practices and more insistent on proper credit. The 'terms and conditions' link at the bottom of every page on this site leads to information on how to acknowledge web sources properly. (Or go to http://www.skyscript.co.uk/legal.html#mr ).

(I've also seen passages taken from articles published on this site, reproduced in astrological journals with no more than a reference to www.skyscript.co.uk. (no specific link; no credit to the author). So print editors need to raise their standard too.)

Rin.ru, (as we can see from http://rin.ru/index_e.html ) is a large Russian Information network, which offers various portals to specific topics. Its astrological site is available in Russian, or English at http://astro.rin.ru/eng/index.html

The whole ?History? section of this site is an unauthorised reproduction of Nick Campion?s Introduction to the History of Astrology, broken down into its various chapters.

Nick Campion has already made this book available on his own site at http://www.nickcampion.com/nc/history/intro.htm where it clearly shows the work to be under his copyright. If anyone wants to access the text they can do so there, for free. The beauty of the web has always been its potential for networks and quick links, so that other astrologers can be brought instantly to this place by related sites which appreciate its content. There is no need, or benefit, in unauthorised reproductions. In fact unnecessary reproductions bog the web down and clutter up the search engines.

RIN.ru reproduces all of this information without making a single acknowledgement to Nick Campion. Presumably they hope that the visitors will be impressed by this knowledge of astrological history and show enough confidence in the astrological integrity of the site to purchase one of the many astrological services that they sell. There is a copyright notice at the bottom of the page, but only to declare that the content is copyrighted to RIN.ru (Copyright RIN ? 2002- 2007 ).

Subsequently, some credible articles that have made use of the information have acknowledged the source of Nick?s material to be the unscrupulous site owners that have stolen it. An example can be found on the website of the Veritas Society http://vsociety.net/wiki/Assyro-Babylonian_magick

Here the author of the article Assyro-Babylonian magick lists his bibliography at the end to include acknowledgement to

. Astrology at RIN.ru. History. Mesopotamia. http://astro.rin.ru/eng/htmls/history/astro3-1.html

For another example (of many) check out the 2nd post in this ?China History Forum?, where Nick?s brief chapter on Chinese astrology is reproduced in full, with the poster giving the acknowledgement as follows:

Source: Russian Information Network
Site: http://astro.rin.ru/eng/htmls/history/astro7-1.html

Nick Campion became aware of this situation two years ago, and regards the people who did this as thieves. He has emailed them to state that they have stolen, without asking his permission, his work on the history of astrology, and allowed the fraudulent impression that the work belongs to them.

The very best that Nick Campion can hope for is that eventually they remove the material, and that this will not entail too much fruitless expense of time and effort on his part. If he is fortunate and that does happen, it will be too late to prevent the situation causing lasting damage by all the extracts and reproductions that have escaped his control and given the credits elsewhere.

This may be a bit off the topic but it is related. There is a great service that will search the web and tell you who has plagiarized your website. You simply type in your web site address and it searches the web and shows you the results very quickly. I found that two different sites had copied my material verbatim. The site is http://www.copyscape.com/
And it is a free service.

My site has been plagiarized repeatedly. I continue to maintain the site because it seems to serve an educational purpose for those who are interested in esoteric astrology, but I haven't added anything new to it for years, nor will I again. A lawyer told me that it would cost a minimum of $10,000 US to prosecute even a single copyright violation, and there have literally been hundreds of them (sometimes only a sentence; sometimes entire articles). I no longer advertise the site, nor do I post links to it anywhere.

Thank you to James Frazier for posting the link to Copyspace. Anyone who has published his or her work on the Internet should be prepared to be shocked by the results of a Copyspace search.

Even my poor blog was copied !
It is too much lazyness, isn?t it?

This Indian astrologer from Budapest ripped of Pingree's translation of the Yavanajataka and posted it on his website without even acknowledging that Pingree was the translator. It seems like he typed it up word for word, because it is an awfully clean copy of the text to have been an OCR scan. It is only the translation from book 2 though. He seems to have disregarded the commentary. Here is the link:

http://www.brihaspati.net/yavana_jataka.htm

My website has a good 80 pages, much of it original work with full accreditations to those authors I quote...and as far as I can see there has been no plagirism although I haven't checked every single page.

I put my words out there fully knowing that someone might want to "borrow" them. There was one astrologer I suspected of lifting some of my ideas but then she is well-known to do that to everyone.

I think people are largely ignorant of what "copyright" means.

On my site I get verbal/written approval by lecturers to post my notes of their lecture onto my site.

To be honest I think being wrongfully accused of plagirizing is probably much worse. What I tell anyone who is upset when someone steals their work is this: at least you can go back to the creative well and produce. Someone who plagirizes cannot ever do that. They have nothing with which to work.

Btw I made the mistake of quoting something from another site, and linking to them, but not asking their permission to do that first. Later on I realized my error and confessed to them. They were kind of coolish toward me at first but then relented---a link is a link after all!
But I won't do it again!

Would you please tell me the accepted procedure for quoting an author when posting.

I would hate to think I was doing the wrong thing by people I really admire.

Is there a word limit?

I quote the passage and then name the author,name of book and page number.

Is that sufficient?

Obviously this would depend for a start upon the copyright status of the publication concerned, which varies according to the different rules used in different countries. While the rules are quite complicated, as a general guideline:

1: In the US, all books first published before January 1st 1923 are automatically out of copyright; all books first published or textually altered new editions published between January 1st 1923 and December 31st 1963 will remain copyrighted for 95 years from the date of first publication provided that copyright was formally renewed 28 years after it was first registered, but are already out of copyright if it was not; all books first published on or after January 1st 1964 but not later than December 31st 1978 will remain copyrighted for 95 years from the date of publication regardless of whether or not copyright was renewed; and all books first published on or after January 1st 1979 will remain copyrighted until 70 years after the author's death regardless of whether or not copyright was renewed.

2. In all countries that have been signatories to the original Bern Convention on copyright in the mid-20th century, which I know includes the UK and most if not all other European countries, but excludes the US, all books that have been published in any of these countries or whose authors were nationals of any of these countries are copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the author without any requirement for copyright renewal, regardless of whether they were first published before 1923 or after 1923.

I believe that since Skyscript is a site hosted on a UK server it is answerable to Rule 2, which means that even works first published before 1923 are copyrighted until 70 years after the author's death, so for example if a young British astrologer had emigrated to the US then published a classic book in the USA in 1896 at the age of 25, before living to the age of 85, his work would still be protected today on this site by copyright, and would remain so until 2026, whereas in the US the same work would be out of copyright.

Unfortunately it is not always easy to determine the dates of deaths for authors, and there are many astrological authors for whom no such records exist on the Internet.

These rules notwithstanding, many works that are no longer in print today, though technically in copyright, are republished without permission by publishing houses in cases where the author is deceased, no information about the author's heir is readily to be found, and the original publishing company is defunct or has been taken over by a new company that has shown no interest in republishing its work. The ethics of republishing these so-called 'orphan works' are a minefield of controversy, with consumer demand for the material serving as a strong case for reprinting but the legal right of refusal of the owners of the rights or their heirs nonetheless remaining absolute.

When it comes to rules for quoting for reviews, articles etc., I am not sure there is any hard and fast rule on the number of words permissible by law, so it becomes a legally grey area, but many publishers have their own particular house guidelines which may be worth consulting if only to avoid angering them. For instance, I believe Llewellyn Worldwide suggests a limit of somewhere between 150 and 250 words in total from any one entire work, though I forget exactly at which end of the spectrum its allowance lies.

In the United States of America, the 'fair use' clause would seem to allow for much lengthier citations in certain not-for-profit circumstances, provided that a certain fraction of the overall word-count in the complete work (ie book) is not exceeded. The liberal tolerance of this clause may not be appreciated by publishers or authors however, so even if it were to be defensible in court, it might be advisable to ask for permission for any length in excess of the kind of guideline suggested by Llewellyn.

In the UK, I am not sure if any such 'fair use' clause exists, so the legally supported rules for quotations on this site may be a lot stricter than on a site hosted in the US.

I'm no expert on these matters, and am merely relaying a little of what I picked up from experience in enthusiastically managing a large amateur astrology group in the past, where these kinds of issues were brought to my attention.

With regard to the correct form for quoting, I believe many publishers insist on the name of the publisher being cited in addition to the date of publication and the names of the author and title. This can presumably be done through footnotes at the bottom of a page.

If anyone can build on or refine these rough observations through more detailed knowledge of law I'm sure it would be interesting to read.

Philip

James Frazier wrote:This may be a bit off the topic but it is related. There is a great service that will search the web and tell you who has plagiarized your website. You simply type in your web site address and it searches the web and shows you the results very quickly. I found that two different sites had copied my material verbatim. The site is http://www.copyscape.com/
And it is a free service.

I tried that with AstroAmerica, my site. To my surprise, I found that only my "Top Ten" list had been copied, and by only two sites, one of which gave attribution. I thought there would be some actual abuse. I was disappointed.

On the other hand, most of my tarot illustrations have been copied by a website in London. Copyscape didn't find that, so I presume it cannot find borrowed images. In the case of Natasha, she copied my images without my knowledge or permission, but as she gets all her stock from me, I had no objections.

Dave