Glad I entertained you Mina, I found I repeated myself – sang the same song – on both face book and here. I do this often – Ardis has saved me from myself on at least one occasion. I’ll just blame my faux pas on the brain damage – it’s got to be good for something.

I didn’t mean to suggest copyright law is easy or clear; just that it exists whether or not you use the copyright symbol. I, for one, am done writing about it. I’m not just saying the same thing over and over and over; signs that I’ve spent too much time reading behind the dancing hymn book are beginning to emerge…

As a college professor, the issue of plagiarism is sadly something I know all too much about. And for the most part, like Ardis’s story, my anecdotes have a humorous component as well: I sometimes think I could even launch a career in stand up based solely on re-telling some of the choicer examples: like the student who handed in a paper that was supposed to comment on an essay by Simon Frith (a well-known academic and popular writer on music and media) but was instead a word-for-word copy of another essay written BY Simon Frith. Or the student who turned in a four page essay, each page of which was copied from a different website none of which had anything to do with the assigned topic. Or the research paper on the plight of dolphins which contained the phrase, “As president of Her Majesty’s Save The Dolphins foundation…”

Anyway, am I to take it then that the ‘old website’ in question is now down and what I see when I go to look at this guy’s work is the “new” “professional” one? Because the animated cursor trail and meandering green hymnbook chased me off the site.

I did find his site of course, and he talks a great deal about magazine articles, his site, every single solitary thing he has ever done or created. The man is a late middle-age “writer:” How has he managed to exist and not have a clue about copyright law, current copyright law?

I am a brain damaged, drugged up chronic pain sufferer, whose current occupation is patient/client; but I know you don’t have to put a copyright mark on anything you write, put a new slant to, research/compile, find, whatever. It is automatically protected by copyright the instant you create it.

I’ve known this for 30 years; when all I had written was a suggestion “Women’s Day” paid me $75 for. I’ve listened to others being told a copyright mark would not afford their cookbook, novel, photos, anymore protection than they already automatically had.

I heard this discussed and I don’t think my experience any more specialized than your plagerist, probably mine is a great deal more shallow. So how did he miss out? Put his fingers in his ears and hum any time this was discussed?

No chance of “intellectual” property theft there.

All the irony goes out of the humor when you have to explain it. FAIL. I should have left the poor guy alone. After all, he has to look at those paintings right up front and in person every day. No need to add to his suffering.

Maybe you should point him to Jon McNaughton’s web site. No chance of “intellectual property” theft there.

Humor … it is a difficult concept.

I haven’t bothered much with McNaughton’s website, so perhaps there is some serious intellectual property theft there that I’m not aware of, but I point out that “kitschy, highly derivative art whose political overtones we dislike” is not quite the same thing as “plagiarized art.” Examples of the latter could be found in the opus of Ward Churchill, however.

A Google search suggests that McNaughton’s work is plagiarized all over the Internet. Perhaps that’s what you meant and I’m just being thick.

It was meant to be a professional site. One of his defenses against being in the wrong was that he had abandoned this website in favor of another, and hadn’t recopied my post to his new site (obviously, it still remained visible at the old one):

“Once I realized how much my site was being used by serious hymnists and historians, I gave it a complete makeover to make it much more professional appearing. I eliminated ‘O My Father’ completey as the purpose of my website is to present hymn texts that have had text changes or are no longer used by our church, and it did not fall into either category.”