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 publishes 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).

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. 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.

Updated 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 quite possible that some or all of the other pages are 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.