swap copying and copyright issues
Recently there has been a few conflicts regarding the copying of swap ideas and even the copying of swap descriptions word-for-word. We do not support the act of copying swap ideas or wording, however Swap-bot does not have any specific rules against it. We simply cannot police swap copying because it is just way too big of an issue. So many swaps are very similar and it is hard to know where to draw the line.
If you like a swap idea you see on Swap-bot, and you would like to host a similar one, make sure you contact the original swap’s coordinator to ask politely for permission. It is also good etiquette to give credit for the idea to the original swap host and to link back to the original swap within your swap’s description.
If you are a swap coordinator who is worried about your swaps being copied, consider applying a Creative Commons copyright to your swap. From the Creative Commons website:
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”
We’re a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free.
You can check out the different levels of Creative Commons licenses here.
You can even include the Creative Commons copyright image in your swap description. Because we have disabled the use of HTML, you cannot use the code provided by the CC site, but you can use this Markdown
code:
! [Creative Commons License] (http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.png)
This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License] (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/).
It will look something like this:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Please realize that Creative Commons advocates sharing information and ideas. They define the spectrum of copyright possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. We at Swap-bot also support this idea of collaboration and building on each other’s ideas.
We know that our users spend a lot of time and creativity coming up with their swap ideas and that many take their swaps quite seriously. However, please remember that they are just swaps created for fun and entertainment. Even if you do decide to copyright your swaps through the Creative Commons, it does not mean that there is any recourse that will be taken by the Swap-bot Administration in enforcing the copyright. It is simply a way to make others think before they take ideas.
_(For more info about including images and links in your swap descriptions, profiles, or the forums, check out this blog post and this forum post
.)</em>
