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Montybird
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Cassis - I would guess that breach of copyright is a civil rather than a criminal offence. It can lead to a site being taken taken down by the host ISP and as regards "flattery", it depends how my stolen words/design are being used e.g. if selling a product/service identical to my own I might view it differently.

Di is currently involved in a dispute via Nominet on just such a matter - all her stolen material has been removed from the offending site but as the domain name seems a perfect example of "passing off" it isn't over yet.

John

and

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It's to do with the geographic relevance of your site.

I put "global" because people could come from anywhere in the world to our place. I've also seen "France", "Europe", etc. for places here. I suspect that it's actually ignored by search engines although it would be hard to check in that you'd need to put, say, "France" and try searching using, say, google.co.uk from the UK. Using google.co.uk from France wouldn't be a foolproof test as google knows where you are though you could insert the distribution as "UK" and try searching from France. Note that in doing this test, you would need to leave at least a week for google to pick up the new version of your page.

Just noticed that I haven't got the Author tag in that list. Again, not really that relevant for searches.

I don't think it's in general a good move to lift text, photos and graphics from the sites of others. Certainly not ethical. Having said that, it is a nice complement to see that a travel site has taken my photo of Foix castle although I'm more pleased that they've linked to the photo on my page as that has let me add some marketing text to the photo which appears on their site. In this instance, it's especially useful to me as it's a site that won't accept a normal listing from me yet has, in effect, listed me anyway!

On the copyright issue, I spoke to a commercial photographer about it who stayed with us last year. His view was that as the site has attributed the photo to me, I should immediately send them an invoice.

 

Arnold

 

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Please don't misunderstand me - I didn't suggest that people should be free to lift material from other's websites, in fact quite the opposite, I was saying that no-one should do so without asking first.  For travel and tourist information that's free to copy (provided you acknowledge the source) I think Wikipedia is pretty good, though like everything you see on the Internet, I wouldn't trust it to be 100% accurate.
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I think it sort-of depends on what the information is and how it's "lifted".

For instance, I freely admit to lifting most of those meta tags from other sites over the course of 18 months or so. Some were from "how to" sites, some from "normal" sites. I don't see that as a copyright issue per se as those particular aspects are documented for everyone's use - 'tis just that I came across them on a website rather than a book.

What I have started to get in the last year though is a significant number of people quoting a link to photos on my regional guide that they've picked up on google's image search (which itself gets us a fair number of hits). Once I caught on that was happening, I took most of the fullsize images offline and added some marketing & copyright text to those remaining as an experiment (see http://www.personallychosen.com/pyrenees/bigphoto/Foix.jpg) prompted by our photographer guest. He reckoned that, given the volume of hits that we were getting (pre our September upgrade), that there was a fair chance of being able to sell some on a regular basis (no sales to date but then we've taken 90% of the fullsize photos offline 'til we add the marketing message to them).

As I've said, having these photos on a travel site is good free advertising for us (now that the marketing text is on them) but I think that having them quoted in the likes of the architecture forum is just wasting bandwidth for me.

 

Arnold

 

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Just in case there is some confusion. You can lift Meta Tags they are not and cannot be copy writed, if you could then 90% of the websites would go over night as they are required for search engines. All you are doing is lifting the same ones (in the best sequence) that a competitor uses to help them get their ranking.

Under no circumstances should you ever lift text, pictures, photo's etc from anothe website without their permission.

Having said that Google intends to scan all the books in the worlds libraries and make them available over the internet, in fact they have all ready started. It would appear that if this is done a particular way you can kiss your copyright goodby and there is nothing you can do about it. Somebody, in fact a nobody, with a micky mouse book is trying to sue google about this but things do not look good. I am somewhat suprised at this because I would have thought that if a high ranked author like Bernard Cornwall were to try and sue I bet he would have more money behind him plus public awareness as to what google are up to and more of a chance of winning.

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Copyright is a big, big issue.

My understanding is that google are getting around the copyright issue by operating under "fair use" which basically means that you can copy and republish small parts of a copyrighted book (and in this respect, don't forget to add a copyright message on all pages of your website). From google's perspective then, someone searching their "library" could have a small portion of any book quoted to them but not the entire book.

Another way around it is the "library" approach. Libraries are allowed to loan out only the number of copies of a given book that they actually have. An academic point pre computers unless they augmented their stock by photocopying an entire book. Presumably google could "lend out" on a one at a time basis the books that they'd bought.

(Musings only, before someone shoots me down on the above!)

 

Arnold

 

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Hi making a website is easy and fun, it will take about 2 days to get the basics of writing html, which you can find various tutor pages on the web. www.virtuallyignorant.com is the one i used.  It took me an evening to make a website for my mum, check it out at www.brittanygites.0catch.com, you can use notepad to write html or wordpad etc but notepad is easier.  Once you have done your page you simply upload it to a server, most already have FTP enabled so there's no need to have a seperate FTP program. great bonus as some programs may be confusing for beginners.  You can create a website for free or shop around and pay for your own domain name, but i used 0catch.com and it works just as well.  Or you can use microsoft frontpage or similar programs to make a website really easily, it takes just an evening to master it.  I don't know what the standard rate for creating a page is but its not worth it as its so simple to DIY, if you've got any questions you can email me at [email protected].  Happy web creating.
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Just a quick contribution to this lengthening debate, and with reference to a few mentions in earlier posts about selling brochures on eBay. It is against eBay rules to auction a current sales brochure on the site, and could lead to the suspension of your account . . . assuming anyone notices, of course.[;)]
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Bummer. That seemed like such a good idea too.

What I was thinking was that there might be some way of auctioning information about your place. Something similar (but rather more ethical!) to those auctions that sell "how to make a million" guides. For example, could you sell the name of a website offering "the best place to stay in X"? This, of course, being the address of your own website. I suspect that you'd need some variation on this as that sounds far, far too simple: "a list of B&Bs close to X" perhaps?

 

Arnold

 

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I folks,

I'm back again and wow you lot have been busy on this thread.  Didn't realise what I'd started.

For the record I didn't end up doing my website myself.  A good friend insisted on helping me out with it.  He's done the majority of the work on it with me helping out here and there with finding and designing a booking/enquiry form and availability calendars.  The site is just being tested out by us now but I have a small dilema that you may be able to help on.  My friend has put a note on the home page of the site that it's best viewed at 1280 x 1024.  Now, my computer, which is brand new from Dell is factory set at 1152 x 864 which seems fine.  I personnally find 1280 x 1024 too small but wondered what everyone else's pc is set to and what you'd prefer to see a website at? 

Look forward to your comments before I tell him what I prefer.

 

 

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Personally, I'd say 1280x1024 is way too large, and will irritate many visitors who will be forced to scroll horizontally to view the whole page. We're all used to scrolling up and down to view a website, which is why so many mice have a wheel to make this easier to do, but scrolling side to side is not a good idea. 

I would even go so far as to suggest that 1152 x 864 or 1024 x 768 will encounter detractors too. Many people browsing the Internet will have their Favourites "explorer" bar open down the left hand side of Internet Explorer, and this will effectively reduce the viewing window to about 800 pixels. This has been the established standard for website dimensions for years, despite enhanced screen resolutions, and I'd guess that 80% of websites still follow this rule. When we're building sites for customers, we still tend to fix the width at 800 pixels, and float that in the middle of the screen. If someone is viewing at 800, then it fits perfectly. If they're viewing at a higher resolution, but with the Favourites panel open, it still fits perfectly. If they're browsing at full-screen, then they simply have a coloured bar down either side. That way the site offends nobody. 

The alternative, of making your site adjust automatically to fit the user's screen resolution, is also not a good idea, as it leaves you with no control over picture placement or text, and words will snake about the page to fit the available space and look terrible.

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