Thompson, Tryon Cooks Source Article

This was an interesting article. In short it is about a publication, Cooks Source, lifting materiel from a blogger and reprinting it without permission. The blogger asked for an apology and a donation and instead got a lecture on copyright law and nothing else. The author of the article asserts that the blogger was indeed right in asserting ownership and that the publication should not have taken the blogger's material without permission. It then proceeds to explain what the blogger could have done to seek legal remedy.

Your second question is, sadly, hard to answer based on the article. It never explains what the law is. It seems to indicate that the blogger could have registered her article and that would allow her to pursue legal remedy; however, I know that the law is more complicated than this. I can reprint material from ancient Greek plays, for example, without asking permission from the author. I can also, as an educator, claim fair use in some instances and reprint material. If I am doing political satire and can use some material. In short, the law is not simple and Cooks Source may have been correct or may not but I can not be sure based on what I have read.

In terms of morality, well this is a whole other issue. Morally it seems that Cooks Source is claiming that they only used the blogger's source material and then edited the hell out of it thus making it their own. This is exactly what many of my students have done and, frankly, I think I may have done in this class. This seems to be the main issue: if the blogger wrote a piece that was not well done and had to be extensively rewrote, then perhaps Cook's has a point. It still seems a crappy thing to do.

The line between morality and legality is that you can't seek a legal remedy to a complaint unless there is a law involved. As a personal example, I was able to sue a bar for the actions of one of its patron's because of an Oregon law. Whether or not the action was moral is irrelevant. It is not really moral to commit adultery, but it is not against the law. It is also not legal in some states for people to marry someone of the same sex, but it is perfectly moral in the view of many while not so in the view of others. In terms of copyright, it is the law that matters most. I do hope that students understand that taking some else's work and claiming it as their own is, regardless of the law, not something that is ok to do.