Theft of training material
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-08-09 11:47:35 - Graham EllisWe write our own training notes and examples ... and there's one heck of an investment in that.
We encourage our customers to use the examples we provide in their work, but we do get more that a little upset on those very rare occasions where a customer starts earning his own living from presenting courses from our copied materials ... without even asking first, or offering to make any form of royalty payment.
Imagine my surprise yesterday when I found our training material (complete with our copyright statement!) on line at a reputable UK University. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I was duly flattered. But I also felt cheated. And I also felt that the copy didn't reflect our quality as some links in the copy were broken, and images were missing.
A brief email last night has resulted in a short quasi-apology this morning. Apparently it was a mistake that the material was there - but I suspect the mistake was that Google found and indexed it. Included was the confirmation that "it will NEVER appear in my teaching material in future"
Do you like our materials? You are very welcome to link to any of our pages - for a specific topic, you can find the appropriate page within our modules list. Do you want to use our materials from a course you've attended to do a short in-house presentation to some of your colleagues? Please ask us first and we'll be most accommodating. Do you want to license our training notes - see our policy on this. Do you want to learn on our courses? We run both private and public courses. But please don't steal our material - we're skilled at using and presenting them and we can probably do a better job than you can, and at less cost.