Intellectual property

I have more material to post, but something has come up.

As noted in the post below, the folks at a.p.p.l.e. took material from this blog and republished it in print without my permission. They attempted to have a memorial issue of their newsletter all about Vaiva. Some testimonials they might have gotten elsewhere, perhaps directly from the authors. Others appeared uniquely on this blog, so must have been stolen, and a.p.p.l.e. misappropriated ten of my photos for reprinting as well.

This hurts.

I earn my living as a writer, so when my intellectual property is stolen it's a really big deal for me. At the bottom of this page, and every page that this blog displays, is my copyright notice. What a.p.p.l.e. did cannot be considered "fair use." It can only be called theft.

I was worried that the press might misuse material from this blog, and so search engines are barred from it (the opposite of the usual blog practice). If you google "vaiva vebra" this blog does not show up among your hits. You have to find out about this blog some other way. But my worry was evidently mistargeted; it was those who I thought were friends at a.p.p.l.e. that I really should have been concerned about.

This fact is not widely known, but I produced a.p.p.l.e.'s Report to the Corps for the first dozen or so years. For that matter, I came up with the name and acronym for the organization, and named the newsletter itself. I was Vaiva's hidden resource. And by hidden, I mean fully uncredited; I refused to allow my name to appear in the newsletter. I assembled the articles and photos into the newsletter format, I reviewed, criticized and occasionally corrected the articles, and I arranged for the printing and mailing of the newsletter.

I did it this way because it gave me the two things I wanted: I had final, absolute control over the communication, and Vaiva (or successor editors, notably Katie Hoyle) got all the credit. The a.p.p.l.e. insiders knew of my role, and that was enough.

You might think, as I did, that with this record of service to this organization, and given my status as Vaiva's surviving spouse, that a.p.p.l.e. would have run their memorial issue by me. You would be wrong. As I was.

This also hurts.

I have some experience in this area. I could have helped make it good. I could have helped avoid the rookie mistakes, such as the mislabeled photos, the incoherent layout and the failure to credit Aras for his translations of Lithuanian eulogies. I also was very upset that they excerpted my eulogy to Vaiva. Had I been involved, I would not have relied upon the blog material, but would have pushed for a memorial truly unique to a.p.p.l.e.

But that was the road not traveled for a.p.p.l.e. I will always wonder why.

I can't adequately put into words how deeply pained and angry I was when I discovered the theft of my work crudely reorganized into an inferior print version. If you've read Lonesome Dove, I felt as Captain Call did when he discovered Newt being attacked. I wrote a blistering e-mail that may have captured a tenth of my reaction. I sent it to all the a.p.p.l.e. email addresses I had handy, which I believe included persons currently responsible for a.p.p.l.e.'s governance. I toned it down before I sent it, but I did not conceal my emotion behind diplomacy.

Moreover, I sent it to everyone I could because stealing material from the internet for republication is just wrong, and it reflects badly on the character and integrity of any organization that does it. The theft of my material necessarily means a failure of supervision at the highest levels of the organization.

A few hours after I sent my e-mail, the PDF version of the newsletter was removed from the applequest.org website. The printed newsletter, of course, is already distributed. I have had no other communication from the a.p.p.l.e. leadership.

What should I make of this?