Drawing the line against plagiarism

Please note this important addition to The Reiki Digest:

Copyright © 2008 Healing Movement LLC

And please note this important information, which has been part of The Reiki Digest from the beginning, and has just been updated with new images that might be easier to understand:


The Reiki Digest by Janet Dagley Dagley, The Reiki Digest, a division of Healing Movement LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Just to be sure, here's an explanation of what the little icons mean.

The "By" means that if you take advantage of the Creative Commons license to reprint material from The Reiki Digest for noncommercial purposes, you MUST include attribution -- that is, you must credit the author and owner of the material: Janet Dagley Dagley, The Reiki Digest, Healing Movement LLC.

The dollar sign with the slash through it means you may not use this material for commercial purposes. "Commercial purposes" includes any business purposes, such as promoting your own Reiki services, products, or classes. The slash is the international symbol for "No."

The equal sign with "ND" under it means No Derivative Works. You do not have permission to use material from The Reiki Digest as the basis for a derivative work. That means you cannot take my work, change it, and publish it yourself: not without permission.

If you want to use material from The Reiki Digest in any other manner, for any other purpose, it may be possible to get permission: but you have to ask first. That's not only good manners, it's the law. It's also one of the Reiki Precepts: Be honest in your work.

This applies to any use whether in the United States or elsewhere.

Unfortunately some of our readers have not respected our generous Creative Commons license and have published material from The Reiki Digest on their own web sites, with no attribution and in some case with changes, including introduced errors. That is a violation of our license, and it is also a violation of U.S. and international copyright law.

A recent search, and hardly a comprehensive one, found that some readers have lifted entire sections of text and posted them as their own work, and one has even posted the entire email edition of The Reiki Digest on his web site, complete with photos and advertisements. That web site promotes his Reiki business, which is clearly a commercial purpose.

If we discover that you have used material from The Reiki Digest in violation of our copyright and Creative Commons license, we will contact you and ask nicely, once, for you to comply with our reasonable restrictions by adding attribution, removing your changes to the material, or removing it from your web site. After that, our attorneys and/or the authorities will take it from there.

Our copyright and license apply not only to web sites but to email, print, audio, video, and other forms of publishing and reproduction.

For further clarification, please check out this definition of plagiarism, or contact editor@thereikidigest.com.

This publication is currently free, whether you read it on the web site, by email, or RSS feed. Respecting our rights will help keep it that way.

You still have the right to forward the complete email edition to anyone you'd like, but you must leave it intact with no changes.

And you can always, always link to The Reiki Digest or any article here rather than republishing it yourself.

Thank you.