Unauthorized copies of pages from this web site on dujingtou.com
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Copy-pasting someone else's work, on the other hand, is the only type of flattery available to people who lack even the basic talents necessary for imitating someone else's work, or who are too lazy to even try.
The following links are to a Chinese-language site (www.dujingtou.com) that published a number of pages copied from https://www.savazzi.net and translated to Chinese. Hopefully the Chinese language of these copies is sufficiently correct, and not just a copy-paste job from Google Translate. The latter produces fairly good Chinese-to-English translations of these copied pages, albeit with a number of conceptual mistakes (which may or may not be present also in the Chinese translation of the original English pages).
Several months after I published this page, I was contacted by e-mail by the author of the site discussed below. That e-mail became subsequently buried in a backlog of unread messages that accumulated during a vacation abroad, and I accidentally discovered it over a year afterwards. In it, the author of these unauthorised translations explained that he had meant his website mainly as an archive of data for personal use, and that he would take offline the translations of my pages (which he did).
I have no idea whether the rest of his web site, which consists entirely of translations of web pages from other sites, and is still online as of September 2024, is legally authorized by the original authors. There is no indication that this is the case. This makes me doubt that the explanation the site owner mailed me is sincere. More likely, he is knowingly posting without permission translated materials from other web sites, and takes them offline only if the original owner complains (which can only be done by publishing about it, since he displays no contact information on his site).
Nonetheless, I think this page should remain online, as a cautionary tale that it is not OK to publish copies/translations of pages from somebody else's web site without permission, and put them online and globally accessible. In several countries, the law (or the current practice) allows one to make copies of copyrighted information for academic studies, scientific research, or personal learning/training, as long as this is the only person with access to these copies. In most cases, I tend to subscribe to this interpretation of copyright. I regard it as perfectly OK for visitors of my web site to make private, offline copies or translations of materials from my web site for their own personal use (as long as they stay private). In many other countries, copyright simply means that no unauthorised copies or translations can be made, for whatever reason or lack thereof, fullstop. My opinion is that this blanket denial of copying rights unnecessarily makes the copyrighted work more likely to be forgotten and to disappear from public knowledge, thereby diminishing the reputation of the creator of these copyrighted materials.
Exceptions to this restrictive interpretation of copyright do exist: For example, a brief quotation of a longer copyrighted text is allowed, and a commentary, summary, discussion or review of copyrighted materials, if sufficiently short and creative, is regarded as a new contribution worthy of its own copyright, and not an infringement of a previous copyright. This is clearly not the case, however, of the unauthorised word-by-word translations discussed here, accompanied by copies of the original illustrations. Another exception is that automated web spiders are allowed to collect whatever information is publicly accessible for subsequent analysis, classification and summarization (in the same way as a legally adult person is allowed to access whatever is publicly available online). As an owner of online information, you have technical means to mark part or all of this information as off-limits to web spiders. If you leave it accessible, you implicitly agree to its indexing. A summary or brief quotation of the indexed information can then be made public by the index maker, as long as the index links back to the original source page. This is how I became aware of the unauthorised translations of my pages. This is also how the author of the website in question found out about this page.
Yet another exception to copyright is the periodic mirroring of web sites by publicly accessible web archives like Wayback Machine. I think these archives are a great way to preserve knowledge, even though the original web site may disappear or change (as it often does). These archives make older versions of the web sites available in their original form, and are the only source of this type of historical information. I found this information useful on multiple occasions, when I had questions about exactly what I had published on my web site years ago, when, and how long the information had remained online before I changed or deleted it.
The gist of this story is that you should always be careful of what you publish online. It is always your responsibility, as a publisher on the web, to understand to what extent your materials will be accessible to visitors, and to take action to eliminate, or at least reduce, the risk of unintended spreading of the published information.
The pictures published on the respective pages of the original site are of course also copied (sometimes reduced in size), so you do not need to translate each Chinese page back to English to verify that the Chinese site's page is a copy of mine. Often, each page on the Chinese site starts with a generic intro and the first picture of the original page, then inserts a translated copy of the original page with all the pictures (so the first picture is often repeated twice). Most likely this is the result of applying the same processing macro or template to the original page. This suggests that the copying activity is not a one-off act by an individual, but planned and organized.
Copyright law and translations
According to international copyright law, the translator of a copyrighted text may become a copyright holder of the translation only if the translation involves a sufficient amount of creativity to warrant such a copyright. In practice, only translations of literary or artistic texts can qualify for this additional copyright. The work of translators of technical or scientific texts is not judged to be sufficiently creative for the translator to claim a copyright.
In either case, the copyright holder of the original work always retains the copyright also on its translation. If the translation is sufficiently creative, the translator may thus become an additional copyright owner of the translation, provided that the act of translating has been legal (e.g., the translation has been allowed and sanctioned by the original copyright holder by commissioning to the translator the task of translating the work). It follows that publishing a translated copyrighted work without the permission of the original copyright holder violates copyright law.
Translating a copyrighted work, by itself, is allowed without permission of the original copyright holder if the translation is done for personal use only (e.g. studies or self-training). It cannot be made available for free, sold or licensed to others, or in any way used for financial gain, not even indirectly, e.g. through advertising on the same web site, or through paid membership for access or right-to post on the same web site.
Machine translations, even when manually proofed and redacted, can never be protected by translator's copyright, since their bulk is not a creative work but the result of applying an algorithm to the original text. This regardless of whether the translation algorithms used are copyrighted or patented. The copyright holder of the original text is therefore the sole holder of the copyright of a machine translation. Machine-translations of copyrighted works, like man-made translations, are allowed without permission of the original copyright holder for personal use, as discussed above.
I don't know whether the contents of the entire web site dujingtou.com are unauthorized copy-translate-paste jobs from other sites, in violation of international copyright. They might very well be, and in this they are far from unique among Chinese web sites. Several of the illustrations carry visible papermarks of other sites.
I verified the following pages to be copies from pages of my web site savazzi.net, but the list below may be incomplete. Unsurprisingly, the comments function at dujingtou.com is present but disabled (and I can see no visitor comments at all on this web site), so even if one wanted to, one cannot leave a publicly visible comment to inform visitors and website owners that the contents are in violation of copyright law. I can see no contact information of the site owner, either.
As mentioned above, the owner of dujingtou.com has removed the materials copied/translated from my site. The following links are only for historical documentation.
The following are screen dumps of index pages on dujingtou.com that point to pages copied and translated without permission from my web site. The red frames indicate such pages. It is likely that the other pages are also copied without permission from other web sites. The index page numbers change as new articles are added on dujingtou.com, so page numbers and how the pictures are distributed on each page may look different now than at the time I captured the screen dumps (May 30, 2022). Click any image below to see a larger copy.
If you came here from dujingtou.com, or for that matter from anywhere in China, don't tell Uncle Xi . He strongly dislikes the home page of my site.
Several months after I published this page, I was contacted by e-mail by the author of the site discussed below. That e-mail became subsequently buried in a backlog of unread messages that accumulated during a vacation abroad, and I accidentally discovered it over a year afterwards. In it, the author of these unauthorised translations explained that he had meant his website mainly as an archive of data for personal use, and that he would take offline the translations of my pages (which he did). 
. He strongly dislikes the