Use without permission
Sigh. I just discovered a British words-and-wordplay site that copied nine of my columns, not only without permission but without credit of any kind.
I know this sort of thing happens all the time, and I know it's not the end of the world. For that matter, the site in question has some fairly cool stuff on it, so I'm not saying it's evil or anything. But this sort of thing does irritate me.
For now, I'll give the site owner the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he received these items anonymously via email and didn't know who they were by. (Though a quick Web search would've revealed the answer—but almost nobody bothers to do a Web search to find the source of something they receive via email forwarding.) I've asked him to take those pages down; we'll see what happens. I'm usually very willing to give permission to reprint specific material from my site, but for some of the stuff in my columns I don't have the right to give that permission; people sometimes gave me permission to reprint their material but only in the context of that single column. Really, I'd much rather that people link to my pages than make copies of them anyway.
It's interesting to me to observe my gut reaction to this situation in light of the e-piracy debate. These columns certainly aren't as big a deal as an entire novel, but I'm still annoyed by the copying; I can certainly see why someone would be distressed to have a novel pirated. On the other hand, in a way this is a different issue, because I'm already providing the material free of charge from my own site; the issue for my columns isn't that they're being distributed for free, it's just that they're being distributed by someone else, without my permission and without my name attached. If he'd had my name on these copies of my columns, I might not even have asked him to take them down; I might have just let him know that it was inappropriate to take 'em without permission, and suggested that linking is more appropriate than reposting. But maybe I'd have had pretty much the same reaction I did have; not sure.