Content Sharing and Attribution

Everything on this web site is copyrighted.  Sometimes people are confused by this because the varieties that I breed are open source and can be sold by anyone.  The information on this web site is a different matter.  It represents years of work. I provide it at no cost to increase interest in growing and developing these plants, to encourage more people to take an interest in plant breeding, and, above all, to attract people to our web site. For non-commercial purposes, anyone may use an excerpt, not to exceed 200 words, or 5 photos, as long as attribution is provided along with the material that you use. Each excerpt and image should have a separate attribution. If you are publishing on the web, this should include a link back to the page from which you obtained the material.  When you link back to us, you are giving me something of value in exchange for the use of the material.  That is the trade that we are engaged in.

For any use for commercial purposes or for larger amounts of material than covered above, contact help@cultivariable.com.  You must always contact me first for commercial use.  If I don’t respond, that is a no.  It is only a yes if I respond to you and clearly indicate it.  Commercial use is any use that has the potential to make money.  If your page has ads, that is commercial use.

People often don’t understand that there is a cost to the reproduction of website content.  I don’t advertise.  The main way that I attract people to the website is by developing unique content.  As long as that content is unique, search engines will place my website first for it, bringing attention here.  When you use my content on another website, it reduces my ranking in the search results, which takes money out of my pocket.  Some of the people who would otherwise have clicked on Cultivariable will click on your site instead.  When I allow you to use my materials, I am not just fulfilling a technicality; I am giving you something of value that involves a cost to me.  The cost is usually minor.  If you attribute the materials in the way that I specify, you may actually give me a return on that investment in time.  But if you just take things and use them for your own purposes, you are absolutely causing financial harm to me.

I don’t like conflict, but I am not sympathetic to people who use my writing or images in bad faith. I will ask you to remove them and, if you don’t act quickly, I will absolutely use social media to make others aware of your act of theft. I almost never refuse when people ask and are willing to link back to us, so it is foolish to take the risk.  Unfortunately, if you don’t take a hard stand against content theft on the Internet, the problem worsens rapidly. First people steal the images from you, then from the person who stole them from you, and so on, often modifying the images in the process.  I have to deal with dozens of thefts each year, many quite brazen and unapologetic, ranging from personal blogs, to competing companies, to scientific publications.  If simple courtesy doesn’t motivate you, hopefully fear of exposure will.