(UPDATE, March 29, 2012: This was originally written on April 25, 2010. Since it has happened again this week, on the same web site, we’re placing this article at the top of our site for a few days… again.)
Just a friendly reminder. If you like what you see on Wildfire Today, that is great. The site is here for you to read, and we are happy when you like what you see. Occasionally, though, a person likes what they see so much that they copy and paste it somewhere else, at times with no attribution as to the origin, without which it may appear that someone else wrote it or is claiming credit for the prose that we slaved over, sometimes for hours. This is copyright infringement and plagiarism.
If you are temped to copy and paste our writings onto another internet site, please keep in mind that what you see on Wildfire Today is protected by copyright law. A notice to that effect is at the bottom of every page.
However, if you take a small portion of an article and paste it on another site, and attribute it to WildfireToday.com, that is fine, and is considered Fair Use.
Three times since March 11, what we wrote has been pasted onto another wildland fire forum. (A clue is that the forum has a yellow background.) In all three cases, there was no mention that it came from Wildfire Today, and it appeared that someone else was claiming credit for what we wrote. And these are just the examples that we happened to stumble across at that site during infrequent visits.
If you want to let someone know by email that you found an article on Wildfire Today worth reading, an easy way to do that, rather than copying and pasting the article into an E-mail (where the origin of the text may not be mentioned), is to click on the “share/save” button at the bottom of every article. Then choose the “E-mail” tab. From there it’s easy to see what to do. A link to the article will be sent to your friend.
If you want to display text from Wildfire Today in a non-profit publication or web site, please attribute it to Wildfire Today, and include a link back to the original source. If you want the text to appear in a commercial publication, please contact us first.
