Things You Shouldn't Do in the Blogosphere

1) Do *not* take content from someone else's blog — like mine for example — and post it on your blog without asking, or linking back, or giving any sort of recognition of the author/photographer's work. It's extremely rude, as well as infringing on copyright ownership.

2) Say you feel like stealing content anyway. Do *not* steal bandwidth, too, by directly linking to the the server hosting your victim's images. Not only is this bad form, but it also makes it really easy for the owner of the images — me, for example — to add watermarks, URLs, and copyright lingo. I've heard of people doing worse things in this situation, like replacing the hijacked images with offensive ones. But, I wouldn't do that, because I'm nice and polite and kind enough to share my work. All I ask for is the same in return.

3) Then, after being asked to take stolen content off of your site, please *do.* Adding a couple unhyperlinked URLs that stagnantly refer to where the stolen content came from is not an acceptable solution. WTF?

4) Stop the scraping. Get some real content.

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This, of course, is small potatoes compared to what Rosa is dealing with, but I'm still bugged. I like to be generous. I like to write up and photograph crafty tutorials to share. But I really don't like it when people steal my stuff — it makes me bitchy and ungenerous.

*Note* I've removed the link back to the offending scraper. She apologized and removed my content.