

What to Do When Someone Steals Your Work - thinkingserious
http://www.freelanceswitch.com/freelancing-essentials/what-to-do-when-someone-steals-your-work/

======
chime
My policy for personal projects? Let them and move on. Even if they make $1m
for my work and get covered by NYTimes, let them. Once I have published my
work, nobody can do anything to make it less valuable to me. What I got from
my work was the experience and pride in making it. I am proud of what I do and
don't much care for accolades or money once the project is finished, even if
it cost me something small. Nevertheless, I put copyright notices on my work
(CC dowhatever-license) and request that they notify me before publishing my
work.

If I ever needed to really protect my work, I wouldn't hesitate to put simple
non-annoying/non-intrusive software blocks to deter most casual infringements
however, I would never put in crazy DRM. And if someone still manages to steal
it, I would let them and move on.

~~~
randallsquared
I put my work into the public domain when possible (employers and licenses of
stuff I use permitting), but I _do_ care about money, and to a lesser extent
accolades. This puts me in the rhetorically enviable position of being a
person who creates for a living, does care about money, and still doesn't
believe in the ownership of information in the abstract. ;)

~~~
xenophanes
> rhetorically enviable position

On the other hand, using yourself as a personal example (based on your own
self-evaluation of yourself, which we have no way to assess the accuracy of
for ourselves) is a rhetorical error. Your personal attributes are irrelevant
to the truth, and anyone who doesn't want to believe your conclusion can
easily call them into question and distract from the real issue.

~~~
randallsquared
Well, it mostly just helps when someone says, "Well, if you'd ever created
anything, you'd understand!" or "Well, if you were a
writer|artist|filmmaker|programmer, you'd understand!"

That is, I only seriously bring it out when someone explains with a pat on the
head that when I grow up and start actually creating stuff, my views on
copyright and patents will suddenly change and I'll be in favor of them.

~~~
xenophanes
I don't think it's worth one's time to prepare strategies for how to deal with
invalid arguments that would only be raised by people who aren't going to
listen in any case (they either not seriously trying, or very stupid, or very
ignorant of what constitutes a good or bad argument).

~~~
randallsquared
Oh, I didn't prepare it ahead of time; that's the most basic argument many
people have, and I've heard it over and over since I first came to this
viewpoint ~20 years ago.

------
jfarmer
What would I do? I'd collect a bunch of irrefutable proof and try the case in
public as a way to generate publicity for my project.

------
bradgessler
It can be to your advantage if your competition steals from you because (1)
they don't understand the context, (2) they copy the flaws, and (3) you'll
always be ahead of them by at least a few months since the stuff they copied
is old.

