Debate has arisen over at Dooce's place about stealing web design or content. Here's the deal, folks: Copyright law says that as soon as any material hits the web, it's copywritten. It does not even have to have that © symbol on it, though that kind of makes doubly sure. The creator has to give you written consent in order for you to use it. And it's not "public domain" or "fair use" unless the creator has denounced ownership or has been dead for 70 years. And since Al Gore invented the Internet only a scant 40 or so years ago, I seriously doubt that any content on the 'Net has been created by someone who's been dead for more than 70 years.

I just don't understand people who lift others' work and try to pass it off as their own. Why even bother putting the time and effort in to present it to the public? It'd be like if you were hosting a dinner party, bought the food already prepared from a caterer, but then spent 3 more hours fussing over it to make it look original by putting a garnish on top of a few of the dishes.

I had a problem once where I discovered someone was copying and pasting text from my site and putting it directly into hers. She was beginning all the entries with a one-word link to my site (though it wasn't anything saying something to the effect of "Keith says"). I found her site through my referrals and saw that she didn't actually have any original content; she had reprinted paragraphs from other people's blogs and she also had an affinity for many, many Salon articles as well. I wrote her and very politely said that I appreciated the fact that she thought that my writing was good enough to post on her blog, but I wanted her to take it down because it was my intellectual property and I didn't appreciate the fact that she just lifted my work without permission. She did take everything down and ended up just shuttering her site (which I was fine with -- I mean, it must've been a lot of work copying all those blogs and articles every day), but she wrote me back and said that she didn't really feel she was doing anything wrong because she was "giving credit" with that one or two word link at the beginning of each entry.