To Catch A Thief

To Catch A Thief

A couple of incidents occurred the other day which led me to put pen to paper, in a manner of speaking. I do a great deal of web surfing, looking for information, items of interest, or just seeing what there is to see. Recently, I have come to notice that there seems to be a number of items that are turning up on many D/s and BDSM web sites with either no mention of the author or being attributed to someone else. Two of these items, in particular, are A Beginner's Guide to D/s and an explanation of the 3-section BDSM emblem. The specific incidents which brought this to a head, at least in my own mind, were emails I received, first from an individual who notified me that the Beginner's Guide attributed to one WiserDom was, in fact, taken directly from the work of the same name written and copyrighted by James Bryant, and second, an email from James Bryant himself.

What is going on here? What happened to the concepts of truth and honesty that we, people in the D/s and BDSM lifestyle, espouse as being essential to a healthy and safe and satisfying relationship? Why must we now steal from each other?

Unfortunately, those of us with web sites do not always know that what we are accepting is, indeed, "stolen merchandise". My own is a case in point. I first came across the 3-sided emblem on another person's web site. I wrote to the site owner asking about the symbol. This person sent me their explanation of the symbol and permission to put a copy of their version on my own page as long as I indicated it was their version, which I did. It was not until quite some time later that I discovered that Steve Quagmyr is the creator of the emblem and that the "explanation" had been lifted from Steve's page. I have since been in contact with Steve and have gotten his permission to publish the explanation, plus additional material that he has graciously supplied.

In the other case, I came across A Beginner's Guide by WiserDom on another web site. As before, O contacted both that site's owner and WiserDom himself for permission to publish the work. This work has turned out to be a very popular section on my own page, subNATION, and I have often gotten requests for permission to publish it on someone else's page. Of course, I have always directed such requests to WiserDom himself who, as far as I know, has always given such permission. This has not stopped people from lifting the whole work directly from my site, though. However, more than a year later, I discovered that the original author was actually James Bryant and that what had been circulating as A Beginner's Guide was actually copied from an earlier version of what Mr. Bryant now has on his own site.

The worst case that I have had to deal with concerns the theft not of a specific piece of work, but of a name and the reputation that name has earned. Two years ago I began working on a web site for new submissives, of which I was one myself, called subNATION. The name came about as three of us...myself, my then master ShadowLrd and another sub named Max...were BS'ing around on IRC one evening. We were joking about a takeover by submissives and those submissives forming their own country...a nation of subs...subNATION. That is how the name was born, in July, 1996. That is also when I began to build the site, a site which has grown as I have grown and has, I am happy to say, earned a good reputation in the D/s and BDSM web community. It is something I am very proud of. Thus I was very dismayed to find out that a year later someone had not only bought the domain names subnation.org and subnation.net, but that they, too, had put up a web site called subnation. Yes, I know the domain names are perfectly legal. It is the website that so upset me.

These are just a few examples. I am sure there are many more. This medium, the World Wide Web, the Internet, makes it practically impossible to prevent such things from happening. It is a medium such that we are, more than ever, depending on our own ethics. But what do we do? How do we police ourselves? I, myself, have notified site owners when i have found such glaring examples as described above. Some have been grateful for the information, others have ignored it. That is as far as I have gone, though. I guess i keep hoping that integrity and honor will carry the day. The jury is still out on that one.