Peter: Kat: Idolomantis:
I know in advance that I am going to wax prolix in presenting an alternative view to yours, so now may be a good time to practice your skim reading.
During my brief stint as an English Asst Professor, I watched for what was plagiarism in a student's paper and would have been copyright infringement if it had found its way onto the web. Every college student knows or should know that plagiarism is the theft of someone else's ideas, with the intention of deceiving the grader of the paper in question and obtaining an illicitly high grade, even though no financial gain is involved. When caught, it was rewarded with an F, though it could have been referred to the dean for disciplinary action.
The case in point, though, is that of a 14 year old boy who is bowled over by mantis images, real and imagined, and decides to share his delight by posting the pix on You Tube accompanied by music, which adds to the effect (at least for him and me!) but which was not written by him. It is worth noting that at least one pic on the the second URL carries a copyright notice! The result is a pleasant visual collage which would be unavailable to the vast majority of the public had he not created it, and which might just attract one or two folks, however briefly, to keep mantises and join the Forum.
Two main arguments are raised in opposition to this practice: first that it is bad manners, second that it is illegal.
Good or bad manners are premised on the shared expectations of a peer group. When I came to the US in the late fifties, not only did Americans say "please" and "thank you" with regularity, but also "you're welcome" or more enigmatically, "you bet," which to me and my English friends were somewhat outlandish because we didn't use them in England. Today in the US and England, "please" and "thank you" are almost extinct, and before we condemn such "bad manners" it is worth remembering that the good manners of days gone by, when a gentleman would always seat his female companion before seating himself and would always walk on the street side on the sidewalk and say "by your leave" or "allow me to introduce myself," are now perceived as quaint and outmoded. Any attempt at imposing one's own view of "good manners" on others tends to be frustrating and non-productive.
The legal issue is something else, and has little to do with what is morally right or wrong but rather what can be enforced by fiat, and by lawyers who decide what is "right" or 'wrong" according to who is paying them. Your excellent reference, Kat, gave an accessible insight into copyright law but did not, I think, give much advice on how to obtain a legal remedy for its infringement.
A decade or two back, American authors were complaining bitterly (and rightly, in my view) of copyright infringement by Chinese and Russian publishers. In the late 1890's, Kipling and others were complaining bitterly about the same infringements by American publishers. There is no doubt that a publisher like Thomas Mosher made his living from pirating English and French literary works, but he made many obscure (if you consider Pater's Marius the Epicurean obscure) works available to the American public. In the same way, Peter, your pix, previously known only to an audience "select but few" has now delighted and perhaps inspired, hundreds of folks who would have never otherwise seen them, and that, surely, is a Good Thing.
