Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Please Enjoy This Blog On This Blog

We certainly haven't been without fault over the years, but something is repeatingly coming up that bothers us: Simply taking posts from our blog and reposting it all over the internet. It is a matter that probably many owners of blogs on royalty - I know that for a fact - and many other topics had to deal with, and it's simply annoying. Our blog has an extensive copyright section and we feel that it is time to draw even more attention to it.

It is neither allowed to just copy and paste articles from the blog to another place, nor is it legal to translate those posts with Google Translate, Babelfish or [insert any internet translator you know] into other languages. It has come to our attention that this is especially the case with various Spanish speaking forums, namely Cotillando, Charlemos, and Foros Realeza.

In the past and over the last few weeks, we have been trying to deal with the matter discreetly. We have been trying to contact both the posters and forum owners. Sadly, without much success.

We were told that forum owners are not responsible what is posted on their forum, which in fact they are! Have a look at the General Site Rules and Terms of Service of the provider of your Internet forum software. vBulletin, for example, tells us the following.

(...) No spreading of any copyrighted material (vBulletin or other) is to take place on this site without the expressed permission of the copyright holder, which must be attached to the material. (...) (General Site Rules)

In the past it has also happened that posters who had taken information from the blog without so much as a credit, told us that blogs are no legitimate source as we "simply take information from somewhere else" and repost them in another shape. Even though that might be the case in the daily work of the grand ducal family, we just do what newspapers, books, etc do; we take information and put them in a shape but we do not simply copy and paste them. Many posts require hours or days of research from sources that are not available online.

Even though it might not seem like that to some, we actually spend a lot of time online to find news that aren't on the front page. Even putting information together in another language actually requires time and effort. Sometimes we actually reveal news ourselves; it was this very blog that first reported about the engagement of Archduke Christoph and his Adelaide long before it was official news or the birth of little Count Leopold.

If you wish to share a post from the blog please just post a link to the blog. Do not copy, paste or translate entire posts or portions of posts!

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