trfogey
Very helpful member
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2008
- Messages
- 2,043
- Reason
- PALS
- Diagnosis
- 07/2007
- Country
- US
- State
- NC
- City
- Raleigh
Putting this in the General Discussion forum so that more folks will see it.
Everyone -- please be aware that every post that you make here is available to anyone on the I n t e r n e t. Be careful to guard any information that you wouldn't want spread across and misused on that network by passing it along by Private Message here or personal email.
Today, the author of a "book" about ALS made her work available for download to readers of this forum in order to get some users here to review it. I took advantage of the offer and downloaded the file. Within the first 40 pages of that document, I discovered several illustrations that were screen captures of posts that were made on this board. No identifying information was obscured in the illustrations, and usernames were given in the text to expand on and clarify how the post fit into the case the author was making. One of the users whose post was captured is still active here, as of last week.
Upon discovering these screen captures, I reported the author of the book and her link to our board administrators and David has removed several posts from that thread.
The author's use of those posts was a direct violation of the copyright provisions of ALSForums' Terms of Service.However, a patient 'Netsurfer could have gathered all of these posts using a simple G--gle search. This person got caught because they were obsessive and fanatical enough to want to promote their cause here and didn't think anyone would notice what they had appropriated from here without the required permissions.
So be careful how much personal information can be gathered up here and correlated with your user name. And remember -- what you say here might just turn out to be grist for someone else's mill.
Everyone -- please be aware that every post that you make here is available to anyone on the I n t e r n e t. Be careful to guard any information that you wouldn't want spread across and misused on that network by passing it along by Private Message here or personal email.
Today, the author of a "book" about ALS made her work available for download to readers of this forum in order to get some users here to review it. I took advantage of the offer and downloaded the file. Within the first 40 pages of that document, I discovered several illustrations that were screen captures of posts that were made on this board. No identifying information was obscured in the illustrations, and usernames were given in the text to expand on and clarify how the post fit into the case the author was making. One of the users whose post was captured is still active here, as of last week.
Upon discovering these screen captures, I reported the author of the book and her link to our board administrators and David has removed several posts from that thread.
The author's use of those posts was a direct violation of the copyright provisions of ALSForums' Terms of Service.However, a patient 'Netsurfer could have gathered all of these posts using a simple G--gle search. This person got caught because they were obsessive and fanatical enough to want to promote their cause here and didn't think anyone would notice what they had appropriated from here without the required permissions.
So be careful how much personal information can be gathered up here and correlated with your user name. And remember -- what you say here might just turn out to be grist for someone else's mill.