Content copy in the era of Internet

I´m always following blogs and twitters of known people and last week some public sparks have been all over the place, the reason? A SQL Server consultant was publishing in his blog links to a series of articles, with some pieces of it directly in the blog post (this is usually forbidden by the article´s publisher). Maybe to attract people to his blog or really help the community pointing to good resources (the articles are great!), this should be done with parsimony, then some well known figures from the SQL world went straight to the point and a huge debate was installed.

Letting the buzz aside, I think that we must reflect a little about it. I´ve seen in the past some fights about people pasting other´s scripts in his book and publishing it, scripts reuse in presentations, all of that without giving credits to the author, anyway, things you see when you are dealing with the technical community. After that I wrote some suggestions.

1. We shall not prevent spread of the content, in the contrary, copy at will and help other people, but be respectful and give due credit.
2. If you have a resource on the web that you liked enough, go ahead, blog and Twitter freely about it, but not faithfully copy the contents, simply weave your ideas and point to the page where the content is.
3. It is NOT ugly to use in you work other presentations as a basis or reuse scripts from someone else, after all we have to learn from somewhere, but make it clear to everyone all the sources that were used. The right way would be to ask the author if you can use the information, but in the Internet world the control is weak and sincerely, I do not need people bothering me all the time for something simple as this.
4. If you have no background to speak on a particular subject or you are learning, do not present the subject or make it clear to the listeners, because worse than not teaching others, is to teach it wrong. Everyone make mistakes and I have my share, but we can avoid some mess or embarrassment.
5. Try to create new content or variations of what you find, which may be useful. The world is full of repeated subjects and I think we need to generate more differentiated technical content. I cheer for us in Brazil to continue raise the level of discussions and keep an equal footing with the U.S., for example.
6. If you are going to use multiple (even many!) resources created by another professional, then you'd better talk to him before. Thus you guarantee friendship and maybe even find a mentor for yourself.
7. Read some articles and make a demo does not make you an expert, beware of this false impression. Look continually to improve and recognize your weaknesses.

I have a lot of posts pointing to articles, downloads or news, and I will continue doing that because I believe that I´m following more closely the news than others, so I will share this with the community. But I´ll try always to publish new articles, after all I believe that this is what the community wants to see most.

In the end John has published a nice post about the matter: http://sqltechconsulting.com/2010/03/24/plagiarism-and-attributions-on-the-internet/
There´s a small joke at youTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DWR3zdUsQA

Keep studying, always. I play around with SQL Server for about 10 years, then maybe in the next 10 years I will start to really understand it… ;-)

Doscendo Discimus

Luciano Caixeta Moreira - {Luti}
Chief Innovation Officer
Sr. Nimbus Serviços em Tecnologia Ltda
luciano.moreira@srnimbus.com.br
www.twitter.com/luticm