Blooey's
Editorials-Anime Web Sites
Day by day, the Anime community is expanding. It is also becoming a good starting point for new webmasters. What people don't realize is that most of the time, when people first become webmasters, they tend to steal content from big web sites. Then, they find some way to increase their number of visitors dramatically and totally wipe out the possibility of being accused of stealing content from the people who actually wrote it. This is becoming a bigger problem for many of the original Japanese animation fan web sites that actually created their own content, only to have someone overlook that fact. Other times, people think that the only reason why a certain web site became popular is because they stole a lot of content to put on their own site. In truth, they were one of the very few who actually wrote all the information on their web site.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if someone took my information and images as long as they had my permission to do so and put a link back to my site on the top of the page where they had my content, but most of the time, they don't even bother to ask.
I don't think this is much of a problem in other web communities because if they steal content, it's mostly from respected sites who have copyrights and proof that they wrote their own content, and these web sites just sue the little thieves =) but I don't have much experience in other areas, because my web site has been in the Anime community for as long as I've started checking my e-mail regularly. Many of the original anime web sites have been closed down by their owners in frustration because of this, and the hate mail that they get saying that they stole their content.
Why do they steal content? I know why. I've been a new webmaster once, you know. I have stolen content too. I'm ashamed of myself, and I'm sorry. That was a long time ago though, and I have deleted all the stolen content on my site, and have begun to create a new website, one which I will create with my own intelligence and creativity. Okay, getting a little off-topic there. The reasons why most people steal content are simple. They don't want to create their own content because they don't have time. Or, they think that since it already exists, they don't want to create multiple copies of that information on a certain anime using their own brain.
A few ways to stop this problem from happening to you (or if it has already happened to you, you could still use these methods and hope that they will stop stealing stuff and delete the stuff they already stole from their website) is to put a copyright on it. For more information on copyrights, go to What Is Copyright.org. Please note that WhatIsCopyright.org is in no way affiliated with this website, and is just a resource website created by an individual. You should refer to it for information on copyright infringement and other matters concerning copyrights.
And...I guess that's all I'll say on this issue.
