Ok, here’s the deal.
I want people to show up for these events, to support them in their communities, and to donate or volunteer wherever they can. The whole reason I put this site together was to provide a place where people could find the information they need to see the fireworks displays they love.
So I absolutely want these listings to be republished everywhere possible, and in as much detail as possible. I don’t care if you take just the barest outline or swipe the very CSS styling off the pages, to publish on your websites, blogs, newspapers, wherever.
But I do have one requirement – you MUST attribute the listings to FireworksInOhio.com, (if you wish to link, please link to https://fireworksinohio.com).
I spend one heck of a lot of time compiling and confirming these listings over months and years – and no small amount of money on programming assistance, software, hardware, hosting for unbelievably spiky web traffic, phone bills (in the days before Skype and cell) and so on. I recoup some of it via ads and offers, but at the end of the day, believe me, it’s a labor of love. I’m nowhere near earning a living off this site; if I added it all up it would still be pennies per hour spent.
So I don’t think it’s particularly fair when other entities swoop in, copy or print all the pages (and I have real time analytics – I can see you do it) and then suddenly they all show up on some other site in the order I have arranged them, with the descriptions I have written for them, and a big ole headline that says “We’ve compiled these listings for you!” Cause you didn’t compile them, you came and scraped them from me, and we both know it. And while the events are, for the most part, public information, the compilation of them (and in many cases the descriptions, written by me personally) can be copyrighted to some effect.
So, to sum up, you can take whatever you want as far as information or listings off the site, but it must be attributed to this site.
That’s about as liberal a copyright/republishing statement as you will find anywhere other than on a government website.
Now, in the event that you don’t choose to attribute to all my hard work, and I find out about it (and I will find out. I have a complicated system of alerts and seeds in place) I reserve the right to make as much a nuisance of myself as I have time to become. In past years, this has included (but is not limited to) phoning your place of business to discuss the matter, firing off emails to your management, issuing DMCA takedown requests to your internet service provider to have your offending pages removed, issuing DMCA takedown requests to Google to have your offending pages removed from the search engine, calling you out as a douchebag on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social network where you maintain a presence, and posting screenshots of your theft alongside screen shots of my pages. I also have a lot of lawyers in the family, and I’m not afraid to use them. Don’t think I won’t.
Note to newspaper, television station, magazine, radio and other media websites: I am no longer accepting “Sorry, the intern did it” as a valid excuse. I got no fewer than SIX of those last year, which finally clued me in that it’s the industry standard whiny “it’s not our fault!” response. Tough. If the first thing you teach your interns isn’t “Don’t Steal Content” then you don’t deserve to have interns in the first place. Period.
But it really really doesn’t have to come to that. And I hope it doesn’t. Just – be fair. I did the work. I want you to have the benefit of it. Just don’t take credit for it.
If you have any questions, you know how to reach me.
Meg Geddes
Netmeg, Inc.