Copyright Information

I decided to place a copyright notice on my pages because an individual was quoting my pages in the newsgroups without acknowledging the author or source. Recently, I have discovered several cases of unscrupulous individuals copying some of my best pages for their web sites, even though I have my pages plainly marked as copyrighted material. These practices violate the copyright laws. All material published on the web has copyright protection, not only pages with copyright notices printed into them. People who publish other people's works without permission are thieves.

NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO PUBLISH ANY OF MY MATERIAL ANYWHERE ELSE WITHOUT MY EXPRESS PERMISSION. I will track down all such copyright pirates and sue if necessary.

If you should find any of my material published on any one else's site (except for Bicycling Life or the page I wrote on the Major Taylor Association site), please let me know, as that page is being published illegally. You can use the comment (mailbox) tag at the bottom or write me at kenkifer@kenkifer.com. I won't tell the pirate that you informed me.

This desire to protect my own work does not mean that I am selfish. I am happy to provide these pages for your reading enjoyment at no charge, but I am not giving them away; they are still my intellectual property, and I intend to publish many of them later in a book. Without violating the copyright laws, you can make copies for your own personal use, and you can use short quotes on your web sites or elsewhere provided you 1) quote the passages without changes, 2) identify the author, and 3) furnish the source (a URL or link will suffice). Previously, I allowed newletter editors to publish some of my material if they asked permission each time. However, I have decided to change this policy. My articles are almost always too long to be republished in that fashion anyway. To help them, I have written a web page called Newsletter Shorts containing material that can be republished in a printed newsletter; however, it must be reprinted exactly as I wrote it and my name and the url must be printed as well.

All graphics on this site are my own designs and represent long hours of work. I ask people not to imitate the look and feel of my site or to use my graphics on your pages. Make your own graphics; it's not that complicated, and it is a lot of fun. I use Windows Paint to create my graphics plus inexpensive and/or free graphic programs to convert my bitmap files into the gif format.

All photographs are my own property as well. If you want to use one of my photos on your site, ask my permission, and I will ask for a link back. Do not link directly to a photo. Two of my photos are currently being used with permission in this way.

Those of you with websites may like some more details about what kind of stealing occurred and how I found it. In one case, a bike club had published the page. The editor apologized, removed it, and exchanged urls with me. I think he thought he had permission. In the second case, a new bicycling site downloaded numerous pages from many bicycling sites, not just mine, and I was able to get him to remove all of them. He was using them for "bridge" pages -- pages to attract readers to his site. The third person was the least agreeable. Rather than apologizing, he announced that my page was poor and outdated and left behind a note after removing the page that seemed to indicate that it had been placed there purely to please me but had been removed because he no longer considered it acceptable. I have also received offers from two people who wanted me to give them the right to use any of my material in any way that they wished. They both became offended when I found the idea outrageous.

It's rather easy to find plagiarized pages on the web. Use FAST, choose "exact words," and type in a unique passage from your site. It's your most popular pages that web pirates will want to be stealing, as they think by stealing your page that they will increase the number of hits to their site. I have just checked most of my pages in FAST, and I did not find another pirate, while FAST found my own page every time. The exact word search should also be performed in other search engines because FAST does not index everything, although FAST has one of the biggest databases (FAST is also used by Lycos).

Again, let me point out that using other people's web material is stealing. I spend long hours writing interesting material. That material is intellectual property and has value. I am allowing other people to read and use it for free, but I am not abandoning my right to it. If you want your readers to read it too, just add a pointer to my site. Remember that if the web makes it easy to steal, it also makes it very easy to discover stolen material. Remember also that you can be sued for plagiarizing or copying other people's pages.