Would Fluther allow someone to copy their question?
Asked by
Eggie (
5926
)
June 13th, 2013
I saw on Facebook, a user there had copied someones question that they asked on another Q&A site and people were making a mockery of it——mainly because it was a really stupid question—. Would Fluther allow this to happen. How would Fluther stop intruders from doing this? Is it illegal for members to copy and paste information from this site and post to other sites?
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13 Answers
Fluther would not be able to stop this from happenning. Whilst it is a breach of copyright law to copy something you see on the internet and post it elsewhere, claiming it’s your own, a simple question or sentence wouldn’t be sufficient to claim that it’s exclusively your own original work.
The only person who can stop it from happenning is the author of the original work. For instance if you post a lengthy and original answer to a question on Fluther, and someone else copies it, pastes it into Facebook and claims it’s their own work, then you will have to issue a “DMCA Notice” (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). This is a legal affidavit in which you assert the writing to be your own work. You must submit that to the legal department of the website in question, in this example it would be Facebook. Facebook should then request the other writer to take down the post or submit a counter-claim to show that it’s not originally yours. Fluther or its staff would not be involved in any stage of the proceedings.
Facebook users mocking a throw away question posted on a Q&A site…choke on the fucking irony!!
Our official policy: Anything posted on Fluther may be shared elsewhere, so long as credit is given to the site and the poster of the content. In all reality, though, we couldn’t stop a random person from copying things here, even if they didn’t give proper credit.
Ok then, I was not so much interested in the stealing of credit, but of public humiliation, where if a user asks an absurd question, that question would be presented on a forum like Facebook and used as a means of mocking the person.
Nope. If harrassment is taking place here on Fluther we will deal with it. If the harrassment takes place on Facebook, it’s the responsibility of Facebook staff to deal with it. We would have neither the authority nor the ability to do anything.
As an FYI, I make up a question sometimes when I am bored, and want to hear what the Fluther people think on a particular topic. I remember asking a question way too close to something that had been asked on another QA site, and several users asked me if I had copied within 10 minutes or so. I was shocked that it was a common question. People would not talk to me for days.
There are sites – and maybe other users here know the specific ones – that repost Fluther questions within moments of their being asked here. It seems that they aggregate questions from Fluther, Yahoo Answers and other Q&A sites and just list them all, with little or no “original questions” of their own.
Nobody knows who we are. You can’t call someone out when you don’t even know who they are.
Wasn’t there something that had to do with the Mahalo.com and Fluther a few years ago? Wasn’t Mahalo asked to stop doing something?
@CWOTUS and @Espiritus_Corvus Yes, Mahalo was our most ‘famous’ question-scraper. See here for our blog post about that situation. There have been many others, but most are such small potatoes that they barely register on our radar.
@augustlan that news article isn’t very complimentary of Fluther (or of Mahalo).
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