Councilman Commits Piracy
I am writing you today as a concerned web developer here in the Charlotte area. As you know, website and content is protected material that takes vast resources of time, talent, and money to develop. Having been in the industry for many years I take this very seriously and whenever I find stolen content I always report it. But this one takes special meaning as it has been perpetrated by one of our elected officials, Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon. It is a sad, sad day when when of our so called leaders commits theft and copyright violations so blatantly just so he can line his own pockets.
Mr. Cannon is listed as the owner of a company called BritTrick Energy. On his web page of brittrickenergy.com/index.php/faqs a user will find a list of questions presumably related to the type of business he owns and assembled by Mr. Cannons’s vast experience in the industry. This is supposed to sell a user on his level of expertise and in depth knowledge.
The problem is he stole this copyright material straight from GE. Check out gelighting.com/na/consumer/education/faqs to see where he stole it. It is the EXACT SAME CONTENT. He didn’t even try to change it a little. This is clearly piracy.
Now before you respond with a “so what?”, keep in mind the words of Bruce Clay (a leading authority on web marketing) who writes: “in the case of website theft, the taking of copyrighted materials, altering those materials to look like one’s own, and the placing of those materials onto the Internet for commerce, thus competing with the original author, is theft. It is also a copyright violation, but is still theft and it can and should be prosecuted as such”. See bruceclay.com/ethics/webthief.htm for the full text.
GE’s site clearly shows a copyright mark on the page. They spent countless hours acquiring the materials for that page and poured large dollars into publishing it on the web. The fact Mr. Cannon believes he can just steal it and pass it off as his own is deplorable and highly unethical. That this guy is our Mayor Pro Tem and surely believes he could be mayor one day ought to scare us. We don’t need the leadership of this city conducting unethical and illegal business practices and I do believe that GE should file a complaint with local law enforcement ASAP.
I also hope the Observer calls Mr. Cannon out on this. It is high time we stop giving a pass to local politicians on personal business conduct issues and while I’m quite certain he will try to pass the buck (he didn’t know it was against the law, he didn’t develop the page himself, etc) ignorance of the law is no excuse and as the owner of the company he is respnosible for its actions. Voters need to know when politicians break the law and this is no different than if he had been shoplifting or selling bootleg DVDs.
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