Sam on Keys and Stealing

Hey, this is Sam. Do you see the smile on my face? It isn't there just for the treats you see beside me. I'm smiling at the news we read this morning.

Remember yesterday we posted on how tired we are of the Michael Vick hero worhipping hype? If you missed it, you can read it here. Go ahead. We'll wait. We want you to see the video of the Mayor of Dallas, Texas giving Vick a key to the city and then Vick and his entourage saying they don't care about the dogs when one of the media says he has one of Vick's dogs - one of the dogs that survived being fought and was eventually adopted into a real home.

Well, today we learned the Mayor of Dallas did not give Vick a key to the city. The Mayor didn't give him anything. It was the Mayor Pro Tem and he did not have the authority to give a sports idol or anyone else a key. You can read that short story here.

And we would be quite happy if that is the last Vick story we ever read.

On to a happier, more informative subject. There is a terrific post over at BlogPaws on not helping oneself to photos and stories online. Now, we're not posting this here for our blogging friends because we already know appropriating material is wrong and most if not all of us have had that happen to us at least once.

A good example is that pet blog photos can appear on one of the LOL sites with someone else's name on them and occasionally we recognize a photo. Recently, we saw this happen and when we checked out the one who posted it, we found she'd appropriated a photo of a very popular and easily recognizable blogging kitty, whom we informed, for her own ID photo. The next morning the ID photo was gone. But ... it was replaced by another stolen photo of the same blogging kitty. This time we left a message for I Can Has Cheezburger and a couple of days later that photo was gone. However ... it was now replaced by another kitty's photo that looked very familiar but we couldn't place it.

Now that is definitely a repeat offender who just doesn't get it. She might not steal from the collection plate on Sunday but she does steal, nevertheless.

The problem we bloggers have is explaining it to others, those who grab photos and posts and either repost them - with or without the owner's name, but definitely without your permission - or email them to everyone they know so they circulate around the globe "forever."

Jan is a bit fanatical on this subject because she once discovered someone was stealing every one of her posts from another blog she used to write and putting them on a forum. Not only that, but she found a number of other bloggers whose posts she recognized there too. She tried explaining that posting them there is stealing and if he wanted to share the stories, he needed to share a link instead. Then one night she finished/posted a story at 2 am. First thing the next morning, she checked the forum and her story had been copied and pasted - stolen! - before 5 am. Jan spent hours going page by page to ID every story of hers and those she recognized as stolen and reported it. A forum administrator ended up deleting all the stories, one by one.

You own the stories you write and you have the right to request they be removed if someone else uses them without your permission. If the blog or website owner refuses or ignores you, go over his head!

The BlogPaws post is Not Your Blog Post! Give it Back! We're going to bookmark it for future need. We hope you'll do the same because we'll likely forget where we bookmarked it and have to ask you for the link.

Well, Jan is impatient to get to a project so we have to sign off for the day.