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Enjoying God Blog

Following the posting of my brief article, Plagiarism: My Copyright Law is that You have the Right to Copy, John Piper responded with a suggestion. I think he’s right. Here is what he said.

Sam,

I love your free-hearted permission to use all your stuff that you just wrote about.

One question. Don’t you want to add one more qualification to the two you gave:

You wrote:

There are only two qualifications to that rule. First, I ask that you not charge people for my material beyond the cost you incur in reproducing it. In other words, I don’t want you making a financial profit off others for words that I have freely released to them. If there is a fee that needs to be charged to cover the expense you incur for producing a booklet or article or whatever, so be it. But I don’t want others to have to pay for what I freely give.

Second, if you reproduce something I’ve written, and you attach my name to it, please do not alter in any way anything I wrote without first obtaining my permission. My reason for this is that I don’t want error being disseminated with my name attached to it.

Aside from those two requirements, feel free to copy and make use of anything on this site without having to reference my name.

I (Piper) would add:

Third, Don’t deceive. Don’ t lie. That is, don’t give the impression to people that you created or formulated or thought of what you did not create or formulate or think of, but only copied. This is not for MY sake, but because the Bible says, Be truthful and don’t lie to each other.

Well put, John!

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