Imagine that you're a student, whether you're in high school, college, whatever.
You are given an assignment to write about arthitis and acupunture. You find this article as a good source of information.
You also receive e-mail from a physician friend who tells you all about using accupuncture as therapy for arthritis.
So, what do you do?
Continued...
If you do the following with either the entire article or with the e-mail:
then
and turn that in as your assignment, your instructor will probably either laugh in your face and not accept it, or just plain not accept it (unless you're George W. Bush, and he'd get away with it, but I digress).
So, obviously, a couple of things are on my mind.
1. I keep seeing more and more diaries that are simply copy-paste jobs of e-mail someone has received from ______ [fill in the blank with "friend", "politician", "activist", "lady in Renton, WA..."].
I'm not being a "diary cop" but how the hell is that a diary?
2. The other thing that's on my mind is copyright infringement Markos posted something on Quoting full articles a little while ago. Someone posted a diary recently that was simply a copied-and-pasted section of a book, which according to many on the thread, was a gross copyright infringement.
I don't know much about copyright laws, but I do know that you are supposed to get permission from the author of an article if you want to re-publish the entire text.
I certainly won't get all righteous on your ass about how much research you should do before you post a diary; sometimes posting a couple of links and a summary works fine, but geez, guys, don't just copy-and-paste it and say "THERE! That's my diary! Recommend it and stuff. Thanks! :-) "