They say that “Imitation is the best form of
flattery”, so we suppose that SalsaPower should be proud to find a site that has copied numerous articles
off of ours. The problem is that they did not have the authorization to do so from us, nor from the author of those articles, Stefan Vale, who wrote
them exclusively for SalsaPower.
This is called “Plagiarism”. It could also fall under the category
of "Copyright Infringement". The only difference between their copied versions and our original ones is that they removed any mention of SalsaPower from the articles, many of which come from our
Who’s Who in the Casino Style Salsa World section. Although one of the interviews is actually with the person who plagiarized them, that does not authorize him to copy content off
of our site and post it on his.
In a
telephone conversation that Jacira had with him on July 20, 2001, wherein she
asked him nicely to erase the articles from his server and he refused to do so,
insisting that the author of the articles had sent them to him directly. Jacira
told him that the versions that he had on his site were copied from SalsaPower
and that she could prove it because the versions that Stefan had sent required
minor editing and the versions that were on the other
website contained the corrections that Jacira had made. In other words, they
had been COPIED.
One of the other articles copied was one of the first that Stefan wrote for us regarding
business ethics and integrity. Interestingly, these folks posted a link to it prominently on their home page without even crediting Stefan as the author.
You used to be able to read the plagiarized version of the article, but they
replaced it with a flippant comment: ""Que
hablen bien o que hablen mal, pero que hablen!"
THANK YOU FOR THE EXPOSURE ......"
In response we can only say, "No problem" because now everyone knows
exactly what kind of person would stoop so low as to steal information from
another website. Perhaps it was a total lack of creativity, or just plain envy
of the quality of the articles we have here on SalsaPower, who knows?
Their plagiarized versions
(Screenshots
of their original plagiarized versions.) |
| We
have removed these files and they have been turned over
to the investigative authorities. |
In
addition, there were plagiarized versions of our exclusive interview
with Gerardo Haramboure (although the other website couldn't even
get the spelling of his last name correctly and spelled it "Harambure"),
and David Benítez. Since they have since removed the plagiarized
versions, we can't show them to you, although we have full screen
shots for our records, which we will gladly be showing to the
police and FBI Fraud Investigators.
We guess we should just shrug this off as either reduced mental
capacity, or ignorance of the meaning of the words
“Ethics” and “Integrity”, but in fact it was less than 3 weeks ago that
Jacira received an e-mail from the very person who created this website wherein he states, and
we quote:
From:
XxxxxXxxxxxx@aol.com
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 18:06:12 EDT
Subject: (no subject)
To: jacira@salsapower.com
X-Mailer: AOL 6.0 for Windows US sub 10513
Hello Jacira,
I'm forwarding this e-mails that Mr. Vale wrote to
Albert Pulles. One of the reasons that I haven't published salsaunited.com is because, I wanted to make sure that all the information that Mr. Vale had
sent me was different from the one that you have. Unfortunately, Mr. Vale thinks that it is without importance that he writes the same articles for
Salsa Power as to Salsa United. I have expressed in various occasions that this would be unethical from his behalf. So,
I have decide not to use him for any type of writing for the Salsa United web site.
(All grammatical and structural errors are the author’s and the text above appears EXACTLY as it did in the original, with the exception of the bold and the red color, the original appearing without bold and in black
text. We have omitted the return address so as not to publish his identity.)
We would really like to know why this person changed his mind and decided to use Mr. Vale’s material so extensively throughout his website, especially since Mr. Vale says that he hasn’t spoken to this individual for
weeks, and since the day they published their website has sent him repeated e-mails demanding that he
remove the plagiarized articles, and his name from the website in question. He
has not received any response.
This same individual told Jacira just days ago via a telephone conversation that his website was “not competition” for SalsaPower because his website only represents local schools in the South Florida area, but SalsaPower is global.
We have to agree with him on the second point.
We sincerely doubt however, that the schools which his organization represents in the South Florida area feel
that they are well represented by a website whose content is mostly plagiarized.
And we must say, we agree fully with him when he says that his site is not competition for SalsaPower… not by a long shot.
So with this, we hereby award him the 2nd ÑÓ Award!
…and remember, as they say in Brasil,
“A enveja é a arma dos incompetentes”.
(Envy
is the weapon of the incompetent.)
|
HACKER
NOTICE and APOLOGY TO OUR READERS
This
page was hacked into between 10:22 and 11:33 p.m. on 7/21/01.
The Ñó Award was changed to say very negative things about
one of our SalsaPower writers.
We
have traced the IP address of the hacker through our Server
Logs to an AOL address. We already know who this individual
is and we are working together with AOL and the
National Fraud Complaint Management Center,
as well as the local Office of the FBI to rectify
this problem.
This
individual will be prosecuted to the full extent of the
law. Hacking is a federal offense.
We
apologize to our readers for the interruption of our content.
|
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