Internet Ethics and Intellectual Property

by CORAX
CHA DAO is the work of many hands. One of my great pleasures, as blog owner and editor, is to facilitate the dissemination of that work, and to celebrate the contribution of each author. This celebratory work manifests itself in a variety of ways -- not just in the publication of each post on this blog, but also in the clickable links to other web pages that I try to add whenever I think these might be useful or interesting to our readers. I am also continually updating the list (in the right-hand column, below) of relevant blogs and other websites that I think our readers might find worth consulting.

CHA DAO casts its nets fairly widely. With the constant burgeoning of the Internet -- it's estimated that about 175,000 new blogs are begun every day -- that is no easy task, even if one restricts one's attention to a single topic, such as 'tea.' But we do our best. Naturally, in the course of such research, I see some extraordinary things. Sometimes they delight me. But not always.

It was with no small chagrin that I recently discovered that a blog known as 'Cha Bei' -- written by someone identifying himself as '謏約翰, A Scot living in California, working in China' -- has plagiarized an entire post from CHA DAO -- right down to the formatting. The 'Cha Bei' post was published on 3 May 2008; my own post, from which he has lifted the text, was last emended in July 2007.

He has changed a few words here and there -- my 'Miscellanea,' an unusual (Latin) term to be sure, has become 'Various Phrases,' and so forth; and of course he has taken out the paragraphs at the end where I thanked those who have helped me in the long task of compiling that list. Not surprisingly, he has also carefully snipped out the passage where I say: 'All suggestions for additions or corrections are most welcome; please send these to me [off-blog] at emailcorax {at} gmail {dot} com,' as well as my explicit signature of 'corax' at the end of the post -- these would have been all-too-clear attributions of authorship, which 謏約翰 was clearly not willing to accord me. But basically every single word of what was published in the 'Cha Bei' post of 3 May 2008 is -- virtually in its entirety -- my intellectual property. Indeed my cyber-fingerprints are all over the text: even my odd typographic quirks, such as using three hyphens (---) as a long dash to nest some entries under another entry, have been reproduced, keystroke by keystroke.

Now I want to be clear about a couple of things at the outset. First of all, this blogger does say that the material is taken 'from various sources' (in a parenthesis at the beginning), and that it is 'info I have in various Word/Excel files, compiled over the years' (in a comment at the end). But I submit that phrases like 'taken from various sources' and 'compiled over the years' much more naturally suggest that the work of conceiving and constructing the list was his, rather than mine.

This is made worse by the conversation he pursues in his 'comments' section. When one commenter refers to 'your effort' (emphasis added), 謏約翰 does nothing in his reply to clarify that the effort was not in fact his. And when another commenter thanks him for 'taking the time to put these up,' he replies, 'My pleasure!' -- again with no indication that it was someone else who actually 'took the time' over that list. All of this only contributes to the heavy implication that the work was done by 謏約翰 himself.

Certainly no reader who had not seen the original post at CHA DAO would ever, in a thousand years, have guessed that this material was copied and pasted, basically verbatim, from my original work (apparently from the source code of the CHA DAO page itself). There is no citation or attribution anywhere in 謏約翰's post. And it is not as if the text in question were a small snippet: the material pirated by 'Cha Bei' weighs in at 2673 words. In 11-point type, that would require a Microsoft Word document of seven pages. Moreover -- let us be clear about this too -- my original post was by no means a casual squib, the sort of thing that one dashes off in a few moments, or even a few hours: the list itself cost me many weeks of meticulous research, writing, fact-checking, and revision.

Another thing that needs clarifying: I made this list to be used by my readers. Indeed I say explicitly in the post that 'You are invited to copy and paste these terms into your own list or set of cards; the Chinese characters here are in a scalable font, so in a good word-processing program you should be able to enlarge or shrink them, as you please, for printing out. If your shopping plans are less ambitious, you can simply choose the words you're fairly sure you will need.' So it is not as if I had posted the list along with some version of 'Keep your hands off my text.' On the contrary. But it should not require a law degree, or a philosophical genius, to see that inviting a reader to make a copy of my list, in order to take it shopping with him or her, is not even in the same realm as inviting a blogger to pirate the whole thing, without acknowledgment or citation, and to post it in his own blog. If this is not intuitively obvious from the start, I invite my readers (and 謏約翰) to consider how they would feel if they found themselves subjected to such treatment.

The offense is made nastier, in my opinion, because 謏約翰 demonstrates elsewhere on his blog that he is fully cognizant of the importance of copyright and intellectual property: in his post of 14 May 2008, citing two passages from Roy Moxham's book Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, he is careful to locate his citations by title, author, and page number. And he is willing to do this for the sake of two brief snippets of 62 and 86 words respectively -- not even a single page of text, all told. Is this because 謏約翰 thinks something is more 'officially published' if it exists in hard copy? Or simply because he is more afraid of legal prosecution by Moxham or his publisher, because the book must be purchased with money? It is fruitless to speculate on motives; the copyright and intellectual-property issues are identical, whether one is citing from a blog or from a print-format book. (Actually, they are not quite identical in comparing those brief Moxham citations with the theft of a huge chunk of text from CHA DAO: citing passages of less than 100 words -- with appropriate attribution -- might be defended as fair use, with the evident intention of illustrating what another author has written; the wholesale piracy of almost 2700 words, with no attribution whatsoever, is just plain stealing. And that would be so, whether the text in question were in print format, like Moxham's, or in digital format, like CHA DAO's.)

Over the years there has been endless discussion online about 'Netiquette,' i.e. Internet etiquette. One reason it has been endless is that people are constantly stepping on one another's toes, on the Internet as in physical life. Another reason, of course, is that not everyone shares identical notions of what is polite or kind.

But above and beyond questions of etiquette, I am here concerned with matters of ethics (and even legality) where intellectual property is concerned. In connection with that, for everyone's clarity and peace of mind, I would like to state CHA DAO's Official Policy on Intellectual Property. This is as follows:

The copyright for any material published by CHA DAO, be it verbal, visual, audial, or in any other format, belongs either to its author(s) or to CHA DAO itself. Citations from any material published by CHA DAO must be accompanied by explicit reference to the original post, either by a link to the blog's general URL (http://chadao.blogspot.com/) plus a reference to the exact title and date of the post, or by a link to the specific URL of the individual post in question. (Any CHA DAO material that remains the intellectual property of its author[s] may of course be reprinted or reproduced in other formats at the will of its author[s]; more explicit instructions for this may be obtained upon request from the editor.)

For easy reference henceforth, this is also posted now in the sidebar to the right, directly under the list of regular contributors.

A couple of other things, in closing: when 謏約翰 reads this new post -- and he has demonstrated very clearly that he reads CHA DAO -- I submit that the ethical thing for him to do would be, first, to write me a letter of apology, and second, to take down his piratic post immediately. (If and when this happens, I will add a happy postscript to this entry.)

And finally: although my original post has always been explicitly signed 'corax' at the end, and was already clearly stamped (by the blogger.com software) on the original date of posting with the attribution 'POSTED BY CORAX AT 3:06 P.M.,' I have now added the attribution 'by CORAX' at the head of the post (as also at the head of this one). I hope this will remove any possible doubt as to my feelings on the matter.