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Internet War on St. Maarten

May 13, 2008

 Apparently a new St. Maarten website, SXMpages,  has come under fire for plagiarizing content from The Daily Herald and SMN News.

Both entities have threatened with legal action. The website’s web administrator and developer is leaving desillutioned the Island.

SXMpages’ Gustav Knot, from Dutch origin, states that he has not done anything wrong and he is actually right about this.


For two reasons he is right:

  1. Any news source that is publicly made available loses copyrights under the new copyright laws. Else every news source in the world world would be “wrongly plagiarizing” since the “author” of the news is the one who created the news.
  2. Secondly any news source that publishes any form of news via a so called RSS (Real Simple Syndication) actually grants any other internet source to “quote”, “display”, “redistribute”, under the Creative Commons license.

Here is where Public Prosecutor Taco Stein makes the mistake by stating that “placing a link” is not a copyright violation but “taking over content” according to Stein is.

Since prosecutor Stein is not an internet legal expert and applies still “old time” thinking copyright laws and since St. Maarten is not a “well developed” internet savvy “Silicon Valley”, we can forgive his initial reaction.

Knot is right when he says that “any news provider” who sees his news spread via the internet and is taken “mainstream” is what the “publisher” of same internet content is actually aiming for. So in essence, the intention is to reach widespread attention.

Now in essence, if we apply prosecutor Stein’s reasoning, ZebraBOT in this article is guilty of plagiarizing as to bring you this story we have taken over some of the content of the report.

 

Written by admin · Filed Under Latest News 

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