Claiming Ownership of Another's Work

I find it both humorous but sad that two organizations who report on persecution have recently redone their websites in such a way that copying text from their pages is quite a challenge. When one attempts to do so, a pop-up appears saying that the material is copyright.

I understand and appreciate the need to protect one's own intellectual property. There are many who use our material without permission. Most do so with good intentions and provide credit lines. Others lift our reports and pictures to enhance their own ministries and rarely, if ever, credit the source as The Voice of the Martyrs (Canada) and http://www.persecution.net/. Some have even linked directly to some of our videos, helping themselves to our bandwidth, and them claimed copyright over them on their websites! Now that takes some nerve, doesn't it?

What I find so entertaining and poignant about the practices of these two ministries to which I referred to earlier, is when they often claim copyright over material that was not theirs in the first place. This is especially true when articles are reprinted in whole or on part. In these cases, the copyright holder is the original author, not the organization who reprints it and posts it on their website.

It is time for a little common sense here, folks. Paul Marshall indicated a decade ago in his groundbreaking book, "Their Blood Cries Out" that one of the reasons for the lack of knowledge about persecution in the world was the competition between ministries involved in the work of serving the persecuted church. I agree that we need to be diligent in crediting our sources when we report on the persecution. We need to give credit when credit is due. In the same way, we must not take credit for work that we do not do and claim ownership over material that never belonged to us in the first place.