by ESSpa KOZMETIKA SKINCARE lifted giant chunks of quotes from a GO INSIDE Magazine review Janna Sweenie and I wrote together on Karin Herzog skincare.
Taking intellectual material that does not belong to you and posting it
on your website — commercial or not — to make money or not — on
words that do not belong to you, is stealing.
Here is the URL with the stolen material:
http://www.esspa.net/page/page/144739.htm
…and we will keep that link here (even if it later disappears) as
proof we caught them with their hand in our writing jar. We created a
digitally signed .PDF file of that site to document the theft of our
words for our lawyers.
The theft does not include any link to our review or a full
re-publication. This time the theft is sneakier: They stole huge
paragraphs of our review without our permission and then changed the
spelling of our names from “Janna Sweenie” and “David Boles” to “Janna
Sweeney” and “David Bowles.”
You cannot violate our copyright like that
and ESSpa KOZMETIKA SKINCARE needs to delete any and all references to
us and to our review from their website.
Here is our Original Review: http://goinside.com/98/12/herzog.html
Companies like ESSpa KOZMETIKA SKINCARE that do “business” like that on
the backs of authors who write for free deserve to lose consumer
goodwill. Here are the other GO INSIDE Magazine thefts we have discovered in the past from other companies.
I read your review and looked at their web site, and that’s pretty pathetic. All they had to do was ask if they could quote your article, but they just stuck the information there. Then to misspell your names! Good grief. How much time does it really take to be sure that the names are spelled correctly!
That’s really maddening. I’m sure you and your wife are pretty pissed this morning!
Hi Carla —
My feeling is they changed the spelling of our names on purpose so as not to be discovered via a web engine search. If they had added the URL of our review they would have been found out that way as well. If they were doing the right thing they would have contacted us first.
If they had just linked the article URL without pulling any quotes for use on their site that would have been fine. But pulling so much of our article and copy and pasting it onto their commercial website to help our words make them money is not appropriate.
We would never have allowed them to use all those quotes on their website.
Oh wow, that’s obnoxious. Do you have legal representation and can you pursue something concerning this? That’s just wrong. :\
Hi, David!
I’m sorry to hear about the theft. It’s too bad that they lack creativity and good manners. As for the major mags stealing your work, I would consider that as a compliment if it weren’t so shocking. I guess reputations and originality don’t matter anymore?
Hey Deborah!
I think a member of my mentor’s family directed all the press inquiries into his death to my site and, I guess, they assumed they could copy and paste everything. It was shocking and thrilling at the same time. If they’d given me a writing credit that would have been better even though they didn’t ask.