Yesterday afternoon at about 4:30 I was minding my own business, starting to anticipate my snail crawl along the M3 to the sounds of my favourite radio show, The Fresh…The Fresh…The Fresh Drive.
It was just your average Wednesday afternoon. That is, until Dan, our resident BrandsEye genius, sent me an email with a link to a site where the textbook is listed. Not unusual in itself, I’ll admit… until a closer look revealed that they were not merely listing it with a link to the download, but that they were actually selling it!

Yes, you read that right: some sneaky sneaky weasel of a company (and you know I’m using ‘weasel’ because Kat won’t let me swear in blog posts) has been selling the download that we offer for FREE. Oh the horror! Just to clarify our indignation – eMarketing: the essential guide to online marketing is licensed under Creative Commons. This allows for users to reproduce the content and adapt it as they like, provided that they share it with the community as we do, that they attribute it to Quirk and (and this is the important part in this case) that they do not gain from it commercially.

Clearly someone didn’t read the small print:

This is cached image of the site, I know it isn’t very pretty (apologies for that, but like a moron, I didn’t take a screenshot of it yesterday). After my to- the-point message, they removed the listing immediately. I did ask them very nicely to get in touch with me, and well… I’m still waiting. Humph.

Before yesterday, I didn’t think that this would ever be an issue. Boy have I learnt something:

• There are devious ‘weasels’ out there who will steal content and use it to make a profit.
• Knowing what is yours, who is accessing it and where it is going is important. My advice: monitor your content closely.
• Know your rights and make sure your work is adequately protected. Creative Commons is a good way to go.

Kat has plans to chat to Paul Jacobson, and possibly some other experts, around the legalities of all this next week. Watch this space for more information.

One thing I can say is, bless BrandsEye and of course, Craig who created it and Dan who spends hours each and every day sorting and rating Quirk mentions.

Update: You can check out the chat with Paul Jacobson here.