LANUN LAMAN
28/10/99
Do you remember reading about the man who went shopping for
a car at one of those Sunday car mart...? Someone approached
him with a fantastic offer. Turned out that the car in question
was the car stolen from his porch a few months earlier...
Ever so often I receive e-mails forwarding jokes and articles copied straight from my website. They are usually sent with subject headers like "Check This Out" or "Very Funny". Well, it's NOT very funny to me. Somehow, I feel like the car owner mentioned above. Yet, I can't really blame the senders as they were merely forwarding what they received. I understand it's done with good intentions and that thousands of seemingly ordinary Malaysians are suffering from some form of compulsive forwarding disorder. You can't write-off such people completely though... occasionally they forward you a great autopsy picture or something really gross.
I know it's easy to copy and paste. But if you like something you read here and want to share it with your friends, why not send them this site's URL (website address). Just use your browser's File/Send Page function. Or just copy this URL and paste it onto your mail. Most of the pages here should be viewed with the accompanying pictures and graphics. By copying and sending the text alone, you're only sending 'half the story'.
Then there are those web site pirates who stole entire pages from here, put it on their homepages and proudly declared it as their own 'work of art'. So what's the big deal you may ask. Siti Nurhaliza's or M Nasir's albums get pirated all the time. True... but Ah Chong the music pirate didn't rename their albums "Koleksi Lagu Lagu Ah Chong". If you want to put up a web site, create some original stuff of your own. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. It may just be a few words about your toothpick collection or a picture of your goldfish doing the backstroke. Take for example, my friend Joe, the most romantic guy in Connecticut. Despite getting a restraining order and the threat of a lawsuit, he put up a simple page dedicated to the girl he's been stalking the last ten years. Heck... at least the content's original.
One plagiarist 'lifted' the entire National Page & Lessons For The Mat from here. Incredibly in his biodata, he describes himself as an 'IT professional'. In another contrasting case, a school girl made a homepage (Shao'Site) touching on mundane matters like homework, kutuk-ing, and childhood memories. I thought her homepage is quite entertaining and creative. More so because it's an original expression of her own thoughts. And I have much greater respect for her than that 'IT professional'.
Recently, a Malaysian studying in Singapore e-mailed me and expressed his indignation that someone in the republic stole the National Page and changed it to "For Singaporeans Only". Across the oceans, a commercial website in Hawaii, copied pages from my World Band Radio site. I was lamenting about it and IT writer/journalist Maria O'Daniel (wisely) suggested that I 'CC' a warning letter to the pirate's ISP. Little did she knew (then) that the the pirate is the ISP itself!
For more information on web site piracy (with reference to the above cases), visit Maria O'Daniel's Lepak's Home. It's also a great resource page.
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