On the other hand, to balance the ad hominem attacks, I do receive a lot of
email asking for permission to recycle an essay on my web site. I actually landed
on article in an anthology this way, but for the most part it’s individuals
or groups who want to take one of my articles and reproduce it on their site.
In traditional publishing the short answer is no unless the requestor wants
to pay a fee. For example, a few weeks ago I got a nasty letter from an Associated
Press representative who demanded I remove an AP story that had been cut and
pasted into one of my discussion forums. The story included a link back to the
CNN web site where the article orignated from, but the AP representative wanted
the text removed so I complied.
I maintain a slightly different view of intellectual property. I do reserve
the right to prevent anyone from illicitly copying my material, but if you ask
nice I almost always say yes. The only time I say no is when I definitely don’t
want to be associated with the site doing the copying.
For example a couple years ago I noticed I was getting a lot of hits to my
site from what appeared to be a pornography site. When I visited their site
I was appalled. Both I and Elisabeth have written a few things about rape, and
this site had taken those essays and copied them wholesale without even trying
to change many of the links. Unfortunately the pages on rape tend to get a lot
of hits from people looking for pornographic depictions of rape situations and
this guy thought he would attract traffic by stealing our pages.
But unless you’re running a site like that, I’m generally flattered that people
would want to re-publish my stuff. Just fire off an email to me at [email protected]
with the URL for your site, along with what pages of mine you want to include
on your site.