The Great Spider Goddess looked down  from the starred heights which She inhabits and into the Web of Her Creation and wept, yeah, verily, She wept for the artists and writers and programmers, for the few gifted beings to whom She gave her greatest of all presents : An Original Thought.  She sobbed as though her Great Arachnid Heart would shatter for the sad fate to which this Great Gift of Hers, the World Wide Web, had succumbed...

And in Her Crazed Grief, the Holy Arthropod wove a Magical Tablet of Electrons, a Great Message to Her People, so that Her Beloved Creators should be safe from depredations and plagiarism, so that Her Artists, Programmers and Writers may continue to freely share their Gifts with the World without fear of Insult or Robbery.

What follows is the intent of the Divine Weaver's Commandments channeled for thee:

Thou shalt not plagiarize others' work by claiming it as thy own, even if thou adaptest it to thy own needs or recreatest it. And before thou makest free with anothers' creation, thou shouldst receive the permission of the copyright holder and abide by his or her rules.

Thou shalt not scan, beg, borrow or steal artwork, writing, scripts or even HTML codes, no matter what the source is, unless thou art prepared to wrangle with the License Goddess and Her wrathful Legal Acolytes.   

Thou shalt not use anything on thy web sites which was brought into being by someone else without receiving permission from its creator and paying the necessary license fee, the polite letter of inquiry fee or the logo and link back fee (on the same page thou usest the work!). Thinketh not that thou canst just state "copyright by" and be done with the honoring, for She of the Hallowed Spinnerets reminds thee that "copyright" means thou canst NOT use it without license and permission.

Art thou aware that every time thy pages open and thy html makes a call to creations on someone else's server, that "someone" has to pay for their creations to be displayed on your pages?
Thou shalt therefore always download creations to thy own computer, and *not* link to them directly on anyone else's server, lest the Spider Goddesses' sibling, the Great Goddess Bandwidthya, force the creative to shut down their site because of thy heinous act of robbery.

Thou shalt educate thy people as to the Eleventh Commandment, so that thou mayest rise high upon thy digital mountain and receive the special blessing of the Knowledge of Copyright, and the Appreciation of all the polite subjects of  The Great Spider Goddess. The Divine Weaver hath commanded her servant to create the little plaques linked below  for thee, oh most excellent, ethical and worthy webster, that thou mayest post one on thy pages and inform the world, so that the Great Spider's sadness may be alleviated, and Her Web be made a safe and wondrous place for creators again! 

This Vulturi Iden page  updated on 03/18/2001

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