A big thorn in my side

Months and months (maybe a year, has it been that long ago?) after I did it, someone finally emailed me asking why I had added the javascript thingy to the Charley Project casefiles to make it more difficult to copy them. The script makes it impossible, in most browsers, to highlight anything on the page, therefore making it impossible to select and copy text. There are ways around this however.

The person tried to guilt me, saying that wasn’t the purpose of my site to get the information out there? I replied saying Charley gets the information out there quite nicely. I added the script because people were regularly copying my casefiles and putting them on their own sites without attribution, in violation of my extremely generous terms of service. I would be within my rights to prohibit any and all duplication of the stuff on Charley; as it is, you can take all you want as long as you include a link to me. But quite a few people wouldn’t even do that, in spite of my repeated requests and reminders. In one case, when I wrote someone to tell them they’d stolen my entire casefile and would they either remove it or add a link, they quickly altered the casefile and said, “There’s no stolen bits, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But I had taken a screenshot of the page before and could prove they had plagiarized me and then tried to cover it up.

I don’t understand why these people will not add a simple little link to me. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. I work hard writing up those files and putting them together. If someone isn’t aware of the terms of service, fine, I will enlighten them. But there are some people who are repeat offenders, who regularly apologized and promised to put up attribution in the future, and then continued on as usual, time and time again. I could name them, I suppose, but what good would it do, besides possibly starting another comment war?

The script may well go away soon as Pri upgrades my site for me. It doesn’t really work anyway — as I said, there are ways to get around it and still plagiarize my site at will. The theft still happens, but not as often as it used to I think. But I felt like I had to do something. The repeated thefts were really making me angry.

Primetime report on Alissa Turney

ABC Primetime has done a report on Alissa Turney, a seventeen-year-old girl who disappeared from Phoenix in 2001. For many years she was thought to be a runaway, but now the police think foul play was involved. Alissa never mentioned any runaway plans, she left all her stuff and money behind, and after her disappearance no one ever heard from her again, except for one phone call she supposedly made to her stepfather. The stepfather is, at the very least, a bit unhinged — late last year the cops found a massive stockpile of weapons in his house, which he was allegedly going to use to blow up a local union hall.

This article is very frustrating to me because of it ending, or lack thereof. “Watch our show to hear more!” Well, I don’t have cable, and I never watch TV anyway. But what little they did disclose seems to imply some kind of sexual abuse of Alissa by her stepfather. I wish I could find out more. For what it’s worth, Alissa’s younger half-sister stands by her father and says he was a good parent who never did anything bad.

As to whether Michael Turney harmed his stepdaughter…time will tell. But the girl’s been missing for over eight years. SOMETHING happened to her and it probably wasn’t good.