Historical Ownership

Earlier this month I "tweeted" about something that has bothered me for about a month. It came to a head a week and a half ago when I received an email from Sybil Cook (The Good, the Bad, & the Unread) asking if I would write about it in more detail for a blog entry she planned to write. Throughout last week I crafted a response, sending her my final version over the weekend; she said she planned for the larger story to appear on her blog Sunday or Monday.

My anxiety level began to rise as first Sunday, and then Monday came and went. I emailed her Monday afternoon and asked about the story; she indicated that her co-bloggers didn't see any larger story, so she was having to re-think it all. While my initial tweet was more or less a throw-away line designed to help me let off some steam, Sybil's original request and my subsequent five paragraph "official" response took on a life of their own in my head. Because it now appears as though there won't be an article elsewhere, I'm impelled to go ahead on my own. This is what I wrote last week for Sybil on the issue of Internet "ownership," and in specific, the name of a blog created over the summer: DIK - Desert Island Keepers blog.

The second column I ever wrote online featured the genesis of the idea for the Desert Isle Keeper, aka DIK. That was in 1996. The first use of the actual term “Desert Isle Keeper” – which I found doing a “freefind” search on AAR's live site – was from a 1996 interview with author Al Garratto. And though I know that if I spent more time looking on my hard drive I’d find even earlier references, the acronym “DIK” dates back to at least as early as 1998 and my coda at the bottom of a reader-submitted DIK review for Prisoner of My Desire.

We’ve always been glad to share our content…as long as we’re credited for it. I remember several years ago The Washington Post liberally “borrowed” from our interview of author Elizabeth Mansfield for their obit of her. It was such a let down to me that the paper of Woodward and Bernstein would be so lax in following the rules of journalism that I insisted they print a correction, which they did…a week later. When books have used our material, we ask for credit, as well as when foreign language publishers want to reprint parts of interviews for books published by authors in those languages. The same goes for other online venues. We’re glad to share our ideas, but giving credit where it’s due is very important because we obviously don’t do this for the money or the glory. <g>

Because we’ve been around so long, much of our terminology has become part of the public domain. I accept that, and am happy to see it as a general rule. But to see something like “DIK” used in the title of a blog without deference to its more-than-decade-long history shocked the hell out of me when I first saw it. It also saddened me. Many of those who contribute to that blog are or were AAR readers. In trying to view this from a less cynical perspective, my guess is that because a lot of them are readers first and bloggers next, they simply never considered any larger issues behind taking a term created elsewhere and using it in the title of their blog. An even more benign view is that, because the term has been around for so long, some probably never even considered it HAD a history, particularly if they are newer to the Internet. And, yes, it’s not trademarked. It never occurred to me more than a decade ago that I would need to trademark our content; I figured the copyright notice at the bottom of each page took care of that.

As I have no trademark for the term, I can’t really do anything about it, which is why I’ve kept pretty quiet about it other than a single twitter I made last week, one that interested you. I realize websites are, for many people, less “the thing” than blogs these days, but, yes, I feel AAR was dissed. I actually wrote to one of the blog’s founders – the woman who wrote the first entry – to explain the history and ask for that recognition. But that was Monday, and as I write this to you, it’s Friday…and I’ve heard nothing in return.

It’s incredibly difficult to go public with my reactions on this because I have friends who write for the blog, and I hold onto the belief that they simply didn’t consider what they were doing when they came up with the name and/or agreed to be part of it. Earlier this year I experienced a crisis of confidence about AAR and to process through that in order to arrive at a positive place, emotionally speaking, I had to try and let go of what other venues did/do/will do and instead, focus on what WE’RE doing. But because this particular instance struck so close to home, I’ve not done a very good job of that as I’m still sad and frustrated. I’d hoped that my throw-away tweet would end it on a public basis, and if you’d not emailed me, that would have been it. But since you asked…

Since all of this came up, my husband and I have talked about it. What surprises him is my naïveté in not "understanding" that if you make something available, people will take it, "kosher" or not. He knows that I feel sad and frustrated but cannot comprehend why I don't "get" that the Internet has changed over the past several years and it's now a total free-for-all with no rules of engagement. Thing is, I do get it, but still, stupidly, I suppose, believe that people behave as their parents taught them...that if you must use something created by somebody else, you need to credit them. Just as I need to get over it because obviously that's too old-fashioned an ideal.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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