Google yourself

Have you tried to google your name? Out of curiosity, I did a Google search on my full name the other day. Surprisingly, Google found 1,860 webpages bearing my name. More than a thousand? I was expecting probably 20 or more, but certainly nowhere near a thousand. "Wow, I'm all over the web," I thought excitedly.

When I checked out these web pages, most of them were the write-ups I made for the office I work for (my news items posted on our office website). What came as a surprise though was to find my news reports published in other websites that I didn't know about before.

I don't know if I should be outraged at this, as they published it without my permission. But I guess that's the lesser of two evils, as the worse would have been if they posted my articles without crediting me. I'm not too familiar with copyright laws, but according to Wikipedia, US laws mandate that attribution is not required for work in the public domain since the creator has given up ownership of the work.

So I wonder- is our office website considered a public domain? And I have no intention of giving up ownership of my write-ups. Also, since I work for them, who owns the copyright to my news items- me or them? These details were not included in the fine print when I was hired by our office. So far, none of my fellow writers at work have raised this issue.

This, however, doesn't really bother me that much. What, however, does is that some of the websites that used my reports are commercial sites. Meaning, they make money from publishing news items - my news items, take note - on their sites without explicit permission from me.

Oh, such injustice. Maybe I shouldn't have Googled myself in the first place. Ignorance is bliss, like they say.