Funferal

Copyright and essay databases II

Regular readers will remember my complaint about Essay database sites. Essentially, one such site – Edlibrary – was linking to my essays through a subscription-only link, and were giving the impression that my essay was being provided by them to subscribers (rather than that they were providing a targeted search service to subscribers). Anyhow, they promised to remove the link to my work. Except they haven’t. Here’s my latest mail to them.

Ms. Wright,
I received your email, below, in response to my complaint of 19th July. First you appear not to have fully read, or understood, the substance of my complaint. The middle paragraph of your mail is a succession of meaningless, wrong, and misleading comments which seem intended to insult my intelligence.
I am aware how your system operates, and that users are passed to my server (funferal.org) when they want to read the full text of my essay. Further I am aware that “even search engines, like Google,” have not only “the name of FunFeral [sic]” but cached copies of documents in their database. The core of my complaint was the misrepresentation inherent in your operation. As I said in my last mail, and find myself forced to repeat, “you give subscribers the impression that you are licensing my work to them, something you have no authority to do.” To be precise: you had no right to license my work to others other than under the terms of the _non-commercial_ license under which I offer it.
Should you have the vaguest idea of how law works – which you imply with an assurance that you “in all ways support the copyright laws” – you will be aware that the fact that other sites “utilize the same form of content outsourcing” has no impact on the legality of your operation. Further, your assurance is useless as you have not properly addressed my assertion that you are, in fact, in breach of the copyright laws.
Finally, and most pertinent, you have not yet removed my work from your system. You assured me that you would no longer be making use of my material by 1pm on Tuesday 22 July, and yet I still find reference to it in your database. Your continued use of my material is unacceptable, and in light of your previous assurance implies either incompetence or wilful mendacity. I await your confirmation of which situation is actually the case.
Andrew