Entry tags:

Public domain... I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
I came across this on twitter, thanks to John Scalzi.

Back in 2005, Monica Gaudio wrote an Ice Dragon (? I don't know what this is.) entry called A Tale of Two Tarts that appeared on the Godecookery website. It is copyrighted and on a web-domain that Monica herself owns.

Last week, a friend contacted her, asking her how she had gotten published! Monica's answer "I... didn't?"

Turns out, she had. The magazine Cooks Source (Facebook here, they are also a paper publication.) had lifted her article from the Godecookery site and put it in their magazine.

She contacts the magazine via phone and then through the "Contact Us" link on the website, and exchanges emails with them. Finally, they ask her "what she wants." She replies that she wants an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine, and $130 donated to the Columbia School of Journalism.

What she got in response was this (quoted from her post):

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!

Monica is rightfully mad.

nihilistic_kid on LJ has a post about it here as well. And Scalzi posted on his blog as well.

And John Scalzi linked to his recipe for Schadenfreude Pie on the Cooks Resource Facebook wall here, with a plea that they "don't steal it." Bwah!

EDIT: The Smart Bitches have picked it up.

Also, people are looking. And unshockingly, this isn't the first time this has happened. This Pancetta and Green Onion Tart? Is copyright to Giada deLaurentiis, and appears on the Food Network website under her name.

EDIT of "Oh Fuck, The Internet is Here" - The cookssource.com website is down. Dear Author and Gawker have both picked it up.

EDIT the Heidipology: This is the last one from me, anything else will have to go into the comments, cause I'm going out and having me a drink from a non-plagiarized source. Judith Griggs has "apologised" via the wall of the Facebook account. Facebook is linked up above. Marvel, will you? (Screencap here in case she takes it down.)

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	edelweiss 2010-11-04 06:57 pm UTC (link)
	... and NPR, and a Disney-owned recipe site... http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=196994196748&topic=23238 (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sneer 2010-11-04 07:20 pm UTC (link)
	LOL oh shit. This is a succulent, sweet vidalia onion of wank. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	silmaril 2010-11-04 07:28 pm UTC (link)
	Disney-owned? Ladies and gentlemen, the nuclear superpower has arrived. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sarracenia 2010-11-04 07:38 pm UTC (link)
	Seriously. A Disney guy once explained at length to my class how them suing a preschool for painting Mickey Mouse on the wall was totally okay and the bad press they'd gotten for it was totally unjustified. A cook magazine? They're fucked. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tetradecimal 2010-11-04 07:58 pm UTC (link)
	o___O slowly puts down childhood Mickey Mouse ears (Reply to this)(Parent)

	paladin 2010-11-04 08:32 pm UTC (link)
	They also once went after the pediatric ward of a hospital because they had Winnie the Pooh characters painted on the wall of their waiting room. Yaaaay Disney! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	brennalarose 2010-11-05 02:21 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, shit. My local charity clinic has the cast of Finding Nemo on the kid's play area walls! runs to paint over it (Reply to this)(Parent)

	khym_chanur 2010-11-04 09:12 pm UTC (link)
	And what was his response when the entire class made O_o faces at him? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	auralan 2010-11-04 09:43 pm UTC (link)
	Based on my experiences with Disney lawyers, he smiled as they finally understood the gravity of crossing the mouse. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sarracenia 2010-11-04 10:20 pm UTC (link)
	Pretty much what Auralan said, with a bonus aura of "Someday, you too might become successful businessmen like me." I half-expected to offer us all the opportunity to sign a contract to sell our souls to him for worldly wealth and power. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	cmdr_zoom 2010-11-05 05:14 pm UTC (link)
	"Also, thanks to our tireless efforts, nothing made after 1927 will ever enter the public domain." (Reply to this)(Parent)

auralan
2010-11-04 09:47 pm UTC (link)

I used to live in that part of the country. That preschool mess was on the local news for years as that mess dragged along. The happy ending is Universal and Hannah Barbara was more than happy to show up and repaint it for them (and to suck up good publicity). Sadly, I can't find pictures because the mural of the Scooby Gang (not the Buffy version) was fantastic.

More info if anybody cares:
http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/daycare.asp

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	everstar 2010-11-04 10:03 pm UTC (link)
	Goddamn I love those meddling kids. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sarracenia 2010-11-04 10:22 pm UTC (link)
	....oh wow. The Disney guy totally told us they had repainted it for the publicity after the case ended, not Universal. I am laughing forever and regretting that I didn't know this five years ago. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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auralan, 2010-11-04 10:38 pm UTC

sgaana
2010-11-05 01:56 am UTC (link)

Wowwwww.

Okay, personal anecdote time. My father was a graphic artist, and he was pretty good at copying styles. When I was like 5, (meaning, this was in the early 70s), he did a couple of free pictures for my grade school. They were done on 3'x4' pieces of mat-board, or something around that size. They were these big group shots of all kinds of Disney animated characters (up to that time) in the same picture.

The school framed them and hung them in the hallway. I think -- my memory is SO fuzzy on this -- that there might have been a tiny little write-up about it in some local paper (could have just been the school paper) with a picture of me posing alongside them. I *am* sure that there's a color version of those pictures somewhere amongst our family photo collection.

By the time I got to high school, the elementary school (across the street from the h.s.) wasn't being used as a school any more, it was just admin offices for the school district; but they still had the pictures hanging in the hallway. (Aside: it was always freaky to go in there, now that all adults worked in the building, because of course it still had the old bathrooms and water fountains that were sized for grade-schoolers.) I have no idea what later became of those pictures. For all I know they're still there now, or someone might have taken them home, or I don't know, threw them away. Man, I should dig up those family photos.

Anyway, what I'm saying is -- LOL, I guess it's lucky that in the 70s, little innocuous local things like that stayed local and it was a lot harder for The Mouse to track down weird little "infringements" like that. I wonder how many other places around the country were in the same boat as that daycare center?

(Reply to this)(Parent)

sgaana
2010-11-05 02:00 am UTC (link)

(Oh my god. I just remembered -- seriously, my memory is like swiss cheese -- that at the same time, probably from a bit earlier, at the high school across the road, where I eventually ended up, there was one whole giant wall down in the cafeteria that was covered with a mural that the h.s. students had done... of a big forest scene and all the characters from the animated Bambi movie. I am not kidding. And it didn't even get majorly defaced or anything! Can you IMAGINE? I never knew the story behind it but on the whole, the high school kids must have kind of *agreed* to the content of it. The 70s: a Different Time. Anyway, when I was 14, the school was massively renovated, and that mural was obliterated. Wow. We were like "The Disney-Infringing School District".)

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ardath_rekha
2010-11-06 02:27 am UTC (link)

My high school had Mickey Mouse on one of its clock faces for a long time. In the mid-80s, though, they removed it. They didn't say anything about copyright, just that it "didn't properly reflect the academic learning environment." The student body was furious and, in the middle of the night, a classmate of mine climbed up onto the clock tower (about five stories in the air!) and repainted him on there. He was still there when I graduated in '89 but he's gone now... I imagine it was a copyright issue all along. Or, eventually, became one.

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	phasmas 2010-11-08 04:24 pm UTC (link)
	O-o This... makes me think that the depiction of Mickey in that one episode of South Park was not as exaggerated as I initially believed. "YOU ARE ALL ANTS, AND I AM YOUR DESTROYER!" (Reply to this)(Parent)

	drakyndra 2010-11-04 10:12 pm UTC (link)
	She should have realised: No-one fucks with the mouse. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	duraniedrama 2010-11-05 01:24 am UTC (link)
	That's no moon . . . (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sgaana 2010-11-05 01:48 am UTC (link)
	spit-take WIN. Esp. after I just read about this a couple of minutes ago: http://io9.com/5680716/millennium-falcon-rear-window-sticker-upgrades-any-car-in-less-than-12-parsecs (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

(no subject) -

spawn_of_kong, 2010-11-05 09:54 am UTC

	chaos_theory 2010-11-04 08:18 pm UTC (link)
	Oh shit. Disney will kill their men, salt their fields, and laugh at the lamentations of their women. I almost feel bad for them. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ldymusyc 2010-11-05 01:50 am UTC (link)
	I probably shouldn't have laughed so hard at that, but I did. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	brennalarose 2010-11-05 02:23 pm UTC (link)
	This comment is made of win. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sandglass 2010-11-04 11:25 pm UTC (link)
	Oh man, who cares that the Internet is here, we can sit back with popcorn and let the professionals go to town! (Reply to this)(Parent)

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