Monday, June 04, 2007

New Copyright Policy

Since we have launched, we have noticed several other sites (blogs and non-blogs) blatantly copy and take our work and not give us any credit. We put a lot of thought and work into planning features and writing for this site, and we feel disheartened when we see chunks of our articles pasted on other places. We are a relatively new presence on the web and it’s not fair to us when we are trying to build a good visitor base and someone else takes our entries. Examples include (but are not limited to) :
☼ Exact word for word copy and pasting of our first article on Panchanne (we were the first North American site to report on the series).
☼ Users that post our eBay finds a day or two after we posted them on their own sites, and don’t give us any mention or credit.
☼ Users who have copied and pasted chunks of our other articles and exclusives on their own sites.



We’ve had to call in
reinforcements.
It really isn’t fair for us to do all the work and others “take all the glory”. For example, whenever an article is required to be translated from Japanese, we rely on four things. We use three popular online translators for general accuracy, and we have a special staff member that is located in Japan who does the final check in assisting us. This is how we are able to bring you accurate news that is Sailor Moon related from Japan. Each one of us is dedicated to this site and now we are taking measures to ensure this copying without credit does not happen as often as it does.

We now hold a Creative Commons License, and have now copyrighted every article on Moon Chase! Now, we don’t mean to be harsh taskmasters - we aren’t "locking" the site from the world. We have selected the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. We’re going to explain the terms of this license to you all as best it applies to this site. First and foremost, nothing can be copied or pasted from this site, paraphrased or summarized without a link and credit to Moon Chase! Under the ShareAlike terms of the licence, we allow users to "remix" (but here we will use words like paraphrase or summarize) what we have written provided that the opinion expressed in our article is the same when it is summarized (no twisting our words around) and that the user credits and links to us. Users also may not use anything on this site for commercial purposes, because if we aren’t making any money off of our work, why should someone else? We are here for the fans, and comments and fan letters carry more value to us than a dollar. We do not own the copyright to any of the videos we post, nor do we own the stories that we link to, or the VA’s and other personalities. We try to obey copyright as best we can, only posting things that are currently not commercially available in North America. But if someone wishes for us to remove what we have posted, we will comply, no questions asked (and for images as well). We are also going to insist that if you plan on quoting from any interview that we have conducted on this site, that you quote it word for word and (absolutely paramount) you credit and link to us. For more information, check out Creative Commons' simplified terms of the license here.

This article will not be on the front page forever, however this banner will be seen in two places on this site: in a side bar and at the bottom where we will be posting another, shorter, copy of our policy. This policy is hereby effective immediately and affects each and every article posted on this site.

Also users will notice that we have placed this at the bottom of each article: © 2007 Moon Chase! to remind users that the articles they are seeing are our property.

Also: Moon Chase logo is copyright Emily Gonsalves and used under license. Not to be modified or used elsewhere without express, written permission.

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