[TAG] Talkback:128/saha.html (A case of copyright violation / plagiarism ?)

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 08:28:46PM +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> [ Dropped Querent ]
 
[Wince] Ouch. I can hear the thump from here. Thomas, please be careful
with our querents; they tend to be a bit fragile, and I'm running short
of glue.
 
> In fact, can we have something like this in the author FAQ please?  
> 
> Q: "What happens if I spot a mistake in my article sometime after
> publication"
> 
> A: It depends upon the type of "mistake" noted.  Because of the way the
> Linux Gazette operates its mirror service (and we do have a lot of
> mirrors) it's not possible to ensure that any mirror services will
> receive the changes.  At best, you can hope that the correction happens
> "at source" on linuxgazette.net .  Be aware though that in the majority
> of cases, any follow-up information with regards to your article will
> likely appear in the next issue of LG.
> 
> Mangle as you see fit.

Good idea - especialy since we need to make the point that we _don't_
"operate [our] mirror service" in any way at all: we don't have one.
Mirroring is an independent effort, for which we are grateful to the
maintainers, but it is explicitly _not_ under LG control - it's simply
people copying our content with our cognizance (GCIDE, meaning #4. :)
Hence, I'm thinking of "slightly" different wording for our Author
Guide (corrections and suggestions welcome, of course):

``
Q: "What happens if I spot a mistake in my article sometime after
publication?"

Click on the "Talkback" link for that article, and email us your
corrections, citing as much detail and context as possible (i.e.,
location of the error within the article, additional relevant
information, etc.) We will do our best to bring it to our readers'
attention by publishing it with the rest of that month's Mailbag.

"But can't you correct it at your site?"

Yes - but generally, there wouldn't be any point to doing so. Our mirror
sites (http://linuxgazette.net/mirrors.html) pull down our _new_ content
once a month, when we publish an issue. This means that the old content
- including your article with the error in it - is now part of web
history, essentially unchangeable. Note that this is not an effect of LG
policy but simply an artifact of life on the Net; whatever you say
publicly is usually archived - somewhere - forever. The best policy is
to accept that as a fact of life and act accordingly.

There is one exception to the above - but it is mostly a goodwill
gesture that we are only occasionally willing to make. If your error is
going to result in ongoing repercussions - e.g., you have unwittingly
insulted the Grand Poobah of Ungah-Bungah, and now every Ungah-Bunghese
man, woman, child, and spectral tarsier wants to eat your toes for
breakfast - we may change the content at our site just to "show
willing", as the expression goes. If this is the case, feel free to
write to our notoriously-cynical Editor-in-Chief (ben at linuxgazette.net)
- although a letter to the Grand Poobah would probably be a more
efficient use of your time.
'''

>  I realise there's already a note about forking
> in the FAQ, but the above has been something we've been seeing a lot of
> recently, and I just thought having it in a location respective authors
> are meant to read would be a good idea.  :)

Our *New* Author Guide, which I append to the initial email exchange
with every new author, is a nicely-concise document that can be
swallowed whole, perhaps with cuppa coffee to wash it down. Our Author
Guide is a weighty reference tome [1] that is chained to our server and
guarded by attack librarians. I learned a long time ago that "meant
to read" and "will read" are completely unrelated statements; these
days, I just use the above tome to beat egregious policy violators about
the head and shoulders.


[1] It is a corollary of Moen's Law of Documentation
(http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-documentation) that
the larger the document, the less likely it is to be read (unless you're
talking about hackers, who surprise the hell out of everyone else by
reading the docs and using the secrets therein to subvert the status
quo.) I suspect that the people most likely to read the full Author
Guide are the ones who need it the least - and vice versa. Oh well...
perhaps I'll have the bindery do a nice, ornate, *HEAVY* iron cover next
time.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *