Copy And Paste Of Website Content Is Theft Of Others’ Effort
The following letter was submitted to local newspapers and is reprinted here with permission of the author Cliff Vanover. Mr. Vanover is a member of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance Steering Committee.
It’s not a surprise that an opposition candidate would look to the Charlestown Citizens Alliance for campaign ideas and website content. What is a surprise is the willingness of Deb Carney’s group to shamelessly steal entire content, word for word, from the CCA website.
The opposition is now copying the content of posts and posting this content on their website. The posts have the same title, the same words, the same bolding, the same bullets, the same colors, and the same hyperlinks as the posts they copy contain.
We published, on October 2, a post about the Fall Community Roadside Litter Pick-Up Day. We used a post we created in 2019, a post we update for each litter pick-up day. On October 6, an exact duplicate of our post, including the post title, appeared on the Charlestown Residents United website. The banner image was changed to showcase one of their candidates, Deb Carney, and a line of text that thanked Warren Schwartz for his great work to organize these events every year was removed. Not only did they take the content without attribution, they also purposely removed the credit to the person most responsible for the regular litter pickup days.
Another post Wear Daylight Fluorescent Orange For Safety Reasons Starting September 10 was copied along with the orange box image for the post. In this post the only change was to drop a line that recommended URE Outfitters in Hope Valley as a place that carries the correct florescent orange color required during hunting season. I have no idea what they might have against URE Outfitters. This is a post that we have used at our website since 2015 and we update every year.
Even though most of the content of these posts has already been created, by us, it takes a couple of hours to research and find the new information and do the updates. It takes only seconds for Ms. Carney’s group to steal the content. Other posts have been copied and the content used in this way in just the last month. Of their last 10 posts, 4 were copied directly from the CCA website.
Every page of the CCA website is covered by copyright. The copied posts are informational and, although it would be hard to write about these events without using the same information, a straight copy and paste of an entire post is a theft of others’ efforts. In addition to getting easy content, other goals may be to interfere with search engine optimization for the CCA site and perhaps, most cynically, to confuse voters. The same group has in the past copied the CCA platform, our election day handouts, our ballot sign, and phrases from our mailers. Even their name, “Charlestown Residents United,” was meant to be confused with “Charlestown Citizens Alliance.” Plagiarism is just the newest tool in their bag of campaign dirty tricks.
Having the same content and branding leaves voters with the impression that there is very little difference between the two groups, when in fact there is a world of difference.
October 10, 2022 @ 1:48 pm
Thanks Cliff for publishing these true facts. It is sad indeed that political “want-to-be’s” resort to such low-down tactics in their “win at all costs” activities. Hopefully a majority of the Charlestown voters will be a true representation of the residents who filled-in and returned the recent town-wide survey expressing satisfaction with the way that the town has been run and managed for the last 10-12 years by the ethical CCA-endorsed and voter-approved town officials … and that they are not conned into voting for the toxic self-interest candidates similar to those that ran the town prior to the forming of the CCA by reliable and respected town residents.
October 9, 2022 @ 5:08 am
During the last campaign, CRU stated that Deb Carney spearheaded the town cleanup when Warren Schwartz who worked so hard to get ths project on the books was ignored. Ms. Carney could have corrected the information but chose to remain silent and therefore complicit in the deception.
Such plagerism, as described above, indicates a lack of original thinking and shameless abandonment of ethics. As a professional I denounce such blatant thievery. So much for openness and transparency!