If you’d like to copy a story now and then, fine; but don’t steal everything

And, please, don’t add insult to injury by complaining about us complaining about it

Please don’t steal our work ... too much. We have recently been taken to task for being stingy with the news. More specifically, we’ve filed complaints with Facebook administrators about group pages that copy news stories from our site and paste them on their pages so people can read them all for free. They take our work, a lot of it, and steal it from us.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, they perhaps don’t think of it as thievery. But it is. It’s reprinting copyrighted content without permission. It’s taking something of real value and stealing it from us. We’re pretty sure, at that scale it’s thievery.

We don’t see it as us being stingy with the news. The news is out there and it’s not owned by anyone, including us. But looking for it costs time and money. Researching and interviewing costs quite a bit. Taking pictures and writing stories ... lots of work hours that must be paid for. Editing and presenting what we’ve collected ... it’s expensive.

Circulation fees – whether they’re paid for the good old print edition or for an online subscription – help us pay the expenses of production. Advertising sales help cover the rest of the costs and provide us with a reasonable profit margin.

Because you buy a subscription, it doesn’t mean you can give it to the rest of the world for free because you paid for it once. If you go to the grocery store and buy a bag of potatoes for your own use, it wouldn’t be ethical for you to steal potatoes for everyone on your block ... you can’t justify that by arguing that you paid for your potatoes so you can give potatoes to everyone else.

You can’t go to a movie theater and record the movie with your phone and post it somewhere so everyone can watch it for free. Not legal.

Buying something and then expecting the seller to provide it free to everyone else is just silly.

Sure. Sometimes you might cop a free read – pick up someone else’s paper or figure out how to get around the paywall and grab a free perusal now and then. We expect some of that. Since the beginning days of barber shops and newspapers, you’ve been able to go in for a clip and read the news while you wait your turn. We’re not complaining about that. And we don’t care if you pass the paper on to your grandma or your brother-in-law. See an article that particularly interests your club and you copy it and send it to them ... something you do just now and then? We’re happy to have published something you can use and go ahead.

But if you’re one of those who regularly copies our stories and pastes them onto your Facebook page or in some other manner conveys our content to large numbers of people on a regular basis and without paying for those other views, well... then ... come on ... how is that not thievery?

Someone we complained about countered that the Appeal-democrat regularly publishes other people’s work, so who are we to complain. Yeah, but we pay for the right. We pay for collection and production of local news by local employees; and we use state, national and world news from wire services ... and pay a pretty penny for that right.

To be honest, it’s increasingly difficult to be in this business. It’s not as lucrative as it used to be. And our resources (all the human kind) are drastically less than what they were years ago. We’re constantly re-jiggering how we get done what we think we have to get done.

And lately, we’ve begun seriously considering exactly what it is that we should be getting done – what will most likely draw and retain readership. We’ll likely be making some changes in coming weeks and months.

But all that said, we believe we’re producing something of great value to the community. We charge what we think it’s worth and that income helps cover the costs of getting the news.

If you see value in copying and pasting everything we publish, then it must be worth the subscription rate. And that’s what buys our employees their groceries, after all.

Take a story from our site that especially means something to you and your group. Fine. But don’t steal everything all the time. And please don’t add insult to injury by complaining about us complaining about it.