This Pit thread caught the attention of the SDMB staff, and further research showed that athelas (a a member since 2003 who has made over 3,000 posts) has been habitually copying material verbatim from a variety of blogs and posting it to the SDMB as his own work. The Straight Dope rules on copyright are crystal clear. From the FAQ:
[QUOTE=SDMB FAQ]
What’s the policy on copyrights?
Our sponsor, the Chicago READER, has a strict policy on respecting copyrights and copyrighted material. They don’t want their stuff used by others without permission, and so we don’t use stuff created by others without permission. Basically, The policy is : don’t do it.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=SDMB registration agreement]
You agree not to post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or by the operator of the SDMB, except as permitted by the “fair use” provisions of the U.S. copyright laws (in general this means brief excerpts only).
[/QUOTE]
The SDMB staff has said many times that members aren’t supposed to post on the SDMB on someone else’s behalf – your friends should get their own accounts – so even if athelas’ actions were done with the bloggers’ permission, it was a violation of our rules.
Copyright laws aside, we expect what you post here to be your own words. If you are quoting someone else, you should identify the original source and link to it, rather than pretending to be the author.