I’ve been SWIPED!
My short essay on Samuel’s Levitical heritage (seen here on this site) has been copied and added to a British religious website called “Teachable Hearts.” Someone there, or a member of their group, copied my text word-for-word and made it into a downloadable Microsoft Word document (on this page) with no attribution to me or this site whatsoever. There seems to be no way to contact this UK site without going through a registration/forum board process.
I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable in our age of laxed attribution practices, brought on by the widespread culture of copy-and-paste birthed by the internet. There are some good things through all this: these Britons are not charging people to read the swiped information, and they are sharing it with an audience I would probably never reach otherwise. Since the more who have access to the content the better, in the Big Picture scheme I’ll file it under “spreading the word” and hope the next person who wishes to share the essay will have better feelings about citing sources.
In the end, I find it wonderful that I’ve made some small contribution to Biblical studies for some people overseas.
- Bro. David Skorupa
