In school it was plagiarism, and if you did it you failed or were kicked out. In the business world it is called copyright (or trademark or patent) infringement, and if you do it you can be sued. For consumers it can be labelled piracy, and for that you can go to jail.

It all boils down to stealing—stealing words, notes, arrangements, code and ideas.

A common “misconception” is that if something is on the internet, then it is in the public domain or it is fair use. Public domain has a variety of complicated rules about when the work was created or published. Basically, anything created after 1977 is protected for the life of the author plus 70 years. If it was created by a corporation it is either 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation—whichever is shorter. Fair use, on the other hand can be quite subjective. Fair use usually covers educational, editorial, critique and commentary—not “I think that would look great on my site.”

Churches and ministries often get the wrong impression and think that anything of a spiritual nature is up for grabs or that because they are non-profit it doesn’t matter. That’s just not the case. In fact, did you know that all modern bible translations are copywritten and there are restrictions on exactly how much of it you can copy before you need to get permission from the publisher? In England, even the King James Version, is copywritten by the Crown.

Make sure that your entire Web site design is original, whether you provide it or use an outside source. This includes the overall design and all content including photographs, illustrations, music, video and writing.

The rule of thumb is that if you didn’t design it, write it, compose it, develop it or otherwise create it, and if you don’t have the written permission of the person who did, don’t use it. On the upside, there are a lot of people willing to share their creations. Some for free. Some for low costs. Some simply for credit. So contact them and ask.

Want to find out if someone has copied your content? Check out Copyscape. It will show you sites that have the same text as yours. If something comes up, check it out. It is possible that something was stolen, either from you or by you.

A few days ago, the President spoke to a group of Olympic athletes from the Torino Winter Games. Whether it was him or his speechwriter, someone tried way too hard to be cool when he said, “We want to thank all the dudes and dudesses of the snowboarders who are here.”

I think using “dude” alone was trying too hard, but dudesses? Way too hard and way too wrong. No one uses the term dudess. (If you frequently use that terms, please post a comment. I would love to hear about it.) Dudette, maybe, but never dudess.

While trying to be clever and connect with a cool subculture he completely alienated himself. He might as well have screamed, “I don’t have a clue who you are and what you people are like!”

I am sure the snowboarders will get over it.

But what happens when a church tries too hard to be cool? (more…)

I ran across something rather interesting the other day. Now, every search engine has a different way of producing its search results. Google among many other things, considers what it calls page rank in how it orders search results.

Google gives the pages it indexes a rank from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most coveted. There are only a handful of pages with a rank of 10. Apple.com is one of them. I am not that surprised. (Disclosure—I am a big Mac fan.) What did surprise me was that Microsoft.com was was not one of them. Rather, Microsoft.com had a page rank of 9. What was even more bizarre was that when I checked the backlinks to both sites, here is what came up:

For www.apple.com:

• Yahoo! has found 1,968,600 links to this site.
• MSN Search has found 1,624,874 links to this site.

And, for www.microsoft.com

• Yahoo! has found 4,661,700 links to this site.
• MSN Search has found 3,299,908 links to this site.

So much for the rule of “he who has the most links wins.” Microsoft has more than double. Now these things can rapidly change. A slight shift in Google’s algorithm and everything I am writing now could be history, so don’t email me or comment about my info being off.

So I have to wonder, is Google favoring Apple? Could it be that since Microsoft competes with Google for search engine market share, that could be impacting its page rank? Could it be that since Apple’s Safari was one of the first browsers to include Google as the default search engine, that its a some kind of kickback?

Enough on this, I have get back to catching up with the big boys—I only need a few million more backlinks.