Bill Ardolino at INDC needs some legal advice in a case that has implications for all of us. Bill excerpted material from an article posted at Women to Women, a site dedicated to women's health issues, about breast cancer. In his post, Bill excerpted seven paragraphs of 23 to explain to his readers the potential triggers for the disease, complete with a link and block-quoting to show that the material was not original.

That, however, was not good enough for Women To Women, who called this "plagiarism":

The post at http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/002478.php used duplicate content from our following womentowomen website page http://www.womentowomen.com/breasthealth/estrogenbreastcancer.asp, without the author's permission. Moreover, its presence subjects our website to a duplicate content penalty assessed by search engines, directly causing us monetary damage. We do not mind you using our content for discussion purpose. However, please be sure they use the following at the top of the article:

1) Correct article title (verbatim); Causes of breast cancer - the estrogen controversy
2) The author of the article, i.e., Dixie Mills, MD, FACS
3) The following copyright clause, with an active hyperlink back to our site from ?WomentoWomen.com?:

Copyright 2004 Women toWomen.com. All rights reserved.

In addition, we request that you contact us once you have clearly cited and linked back to our site, for confirmation purposes. If we do not hear back from you within 2 weeks or see that this information has been clearly sited and linked to us, we will avail ourselves of legal measures to ensure its removal, in accordance with the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act.

The following link shows the highlighted plagiarized copy of material on your website taken from the women to women website[.]

Bill had linked the article in his post, but did not include the ridiculous citations W2W wants Bill to add to the post. Ironically, Bill linked it approvingly -- in an attempt to help educate readers about the cause W2W holds so dear.

If any CQ readers have legal expertise in this area, please contact Bill as soon as possible. This has obvious implications for all of us.

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