WHAT A DISASTER !!!!!   I have only just become aware of your Southside web site and was preparing to join your list of viewers and contributors.. I am 80 + years old and don't move quickly so I've missed what for me would have been a GREAT RESOURCE.  I am heartsick at the greed and malevolence of the thieves ( for that is what they really are)....   Please accept my condolences. -----Original Message----- From: patcle67857@peoplepc.com To: ohcuyaho@rootsweb.com Sent: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 8:39 am Subject: [OHCUYAHO] Cleveland's Southside website Hello All, Tomorrow would have been the "Cleveland's Southside" website's second anniversary. In that time the site had over 27,000 hits and 52 contributors. I say would have been because this weekend we permanently removed "Cleveland's Southside" from the Web. For the past year we have been aware that a few persons representing a "quasi" historical group have been taking articles from the site, changing them by transposing a few sentences or adding words and posting the revised article to their own site with a bogus source listed. This group is now actively soliciting members to their group and charging a yearly membership fee. As an incentive to join they are promising a quarterly newsletter. The newsletter would have used material from our website without our permission. We have always stated our material was for personal use only and was not to be copied to another website nor sold. We worked very hard to keep our site free of advertising and sign-in requirements, cognizant of our audience who may not appreciate the clutter of flashing banners or the asking of information. Some of our articles took weeks to research and we were proud of our source material. Other articles and photos were included only after we were able to obtain the present day holder's permission and paying a "user fee." That fee was, in some cases, very expensive. "Cleveland's Southside" was our first born and we watched it grow and mature, reaching persons whose ages ranged from their early teens to their 90s. Making the decision to "pull the plug" was extrememly hard. We have no plans on bringing it back. I want to share with you a portion of an email we received from one of our contributors who experienced a similiar problem as ours, but his was before the popularity of online resources (which makes taking and using material as your own more prevalent.) "How sad, that anyone would take what is not their history or their story, and use it. In the 90's, when I was doing my AIDS work, I wrote a eulogy for a remarkable young man (Bobby) and his family. He was extremely popular and over 300 people attended the service. One of his casual friends told he was so moved by it..he wondered because he was HIV if I would give him a copy, which I did. A year later, I was at UCLA talking with one of Bobby's doctors who remembered me bringing him=2 0for care--and then mentioned that he was glad to see what I had spoken about at Bobby's funeral had been published and that it had earned me a Master's degree. I looked at him and said, "what are you talking about?" Long story short, that young man, used my eulogy as his Master's thesis. I had worked on it for days, including things from Bobby's life that he had shared and what his family had shared with me. With some trouble I was able to contact this character and his response to me was t! hat he could not understand my anger or disappointment...as he had done something with it that I never would have done, and if I was that concerned I never should have given him the copy...to this day, I still cannot believe that he took full credit for it. Of course, Bobby's family and close friends knew...but it appears such people are everywhere, and that saddens me Pat. I am in the final years of my life....and there is much about the world that saddens me." Jimmy Hughes We are very sorry if taking the site off-line is an inconvenience to anyone. We knew the risks of uploading such a history inclusive site and had hoped for the best, but enough was enough and we let it go. Thank you if you took the time to read this longish message. Thank you too, if you visited our site, looked and explored but did not take. Yours, Pat Schmidt ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to OHCUYAHO-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message