Pilferer

We wrote the text below when the website was still copyrighted, and we thought copyright would be a good way to avoid some of the nasty drawbacks which are described below. Unfortunately, this did not work at all. So we have fundamentally changed our opinion on some things. We have put the whole website, which means all content, texts as well as pictures, under Public Domain (CC-0) licence. In other words, anyone can copy anything in whole or in part without crediting showcaves.com as the author. This does not invalidate the good reasons below, but we are no longer interested to invest time and work into this topic. Life has become much easier.

There are always people who think they have to "quote" complete texts from other websites. Sometimes they ask, usually they just copy. But it has also happened to us that they ask and then react angrily or even abusive to a negative answer. We are fundamentally against copying our texts. We have good reasons for this, which we believe are easy to understand for everyone. We would like to explain these reasons here.

The texts on showcaves.com are regularly revised. Sometimes they start as a mediocre smorgasbord of half-truths and hearsay. But we try to maintain and continuously improve such pages. However, we have no control over copies, and they will always remain in the state they were in at the time of copying.
Even detailed and well-written texts become outdated and need to be regularly expanded and corrected. Here, too, it is not possible to reproduce changes in copies.
The Internet is a huge hyper-document, and offers the possibility of linking texts from different authors. Anyone who copies content has not understood the Internet.
Those who have understood the internet and still copy have probably another reason. In our experience, the only other reason is to create content without having to do any work themselves. Mostly with the aim of spicing up other content on their own website. This is pure self-interest on the part of the copier, even if he does not earn any money with it. Mostly, however, that is exactly what it is about: earning money through advertising on the copied pages or through some form of self-promotion.
And finally, there are the people who include our texts in homework and other work. For this kind of thing, there are generally valid rules on how to cite. If you haven't learned how to do that, you can find out from Wikipedia, they show you how. We have nothing against citations, we even support them. But we don't believe in people copying their homework.

Another addition [2024]: anyone who copies content and uses it as content for advertising hardly earns any money these days. What's more, AIs are now much more efficient at copying, and they also formulate it beautifully. There are already entire websites that are beautifully written and contain nothing but nonsense. Those who copy have done unnecessary work.