The Audio Pages

Warning to Those Who Steal
Rod Elliott, ESP
Updated 07 October 2007

• Introduction
• 1  -  elektropage
• 2  -  www.pupr.edu
• 3  -  Swedish Thief
• 4  -  eBay Seller

Every so often, people let me know about ESP material that has been found on other sites. In some cases, it's just the schematic, but there have been cases where an entire project has been hijacked, with the new "author's" name inserted. Such blatant abuses don't happen very often, and several offending sites have been shut down because they have simply (and very obviously) used material stolen from my site.

This page will normally (and hopefully) have very few listings at any one time. If you know of a site that has stolen material, please let me know. All normal avenues will be pursued before an offender appears here, and listings will be removed once the material is removed and replaced with a link. Sometimes, a satisfactory agreement can be reached - and again, the listing here will be removed if that happens.

To anyone contemplating stealing material from the ESP site ... don't. Not unless you'd like to have your details published here (not a pleasant thought at all).

I really hate having to do all this - it shouldn't be necessary, and is a terrible waste of time that could otherwise be spent doing something useful. Having said that, I will not allow people to just steal stuff from my site - especially if they claim it as their own work. This is very dishonest, and shows a person's character for what it is. Plagiarism is a pretty low act, and anyone who does so has revealed themselves for what they really are - dishonest and untrustworthy.

For anyone who is interested, the progression and date of publication of any site (or part thereof) can usually be found (and viewed) using The Wayback Machine at archive.org - an immensely useful site for finding old web pages that may have disappeared over the years.

I was alerted to one article in particular on this site, and upon closer examination discovered several more.

Several of the "articles" about opamps have been plagiarised almost word-for-word, with original ESP drawings used as well. As is usual with the useless turds who are happy to steal the words of others, there is no reference to the original ESP page, acknowledgement of authorship or original copyright.

This particular thief has cheerfully included several ESP pages about opamps, and one can assume that much of the remainder of the site has been stolen from other sites.

Since no contact information is included, I just decided to do a "name-and-shame".

Normally, I don't have an issue with use of my material for educational purposes. What I do expect though, is a reference to the original material, and acknowledgement. This is an absolute requirement for any material submitted by a student (for example), and is also the case if material is "borrowed" from a website. Nothing of the sort is seen at this site though - the article "Ideal OP-Amps analysis and configurations" is a direct copy, even including the pencil icon I use to point out things of particular importance.

The page is word-for-word as near as I can tell, ESP logos are visible on the drawings, but zero acknowledgement as to where the material was originally published.

Again, since no contact information is included, I have just done a "name-and-shame".

This is now resolved, albeit not without some kicking and screaming. Many plagiarists seem to get very defensive when found out. At issue was a re-drawn copy of P68. No accidental parallel development here - the stolen version was identical, with the one exception that the SIM connections were omitted. The design was fully re-drawn, so it wasn't an "accident", and included incorrect and very misleading information about the way the circuit works, transistor mounting, etc.

My thanks to those who offered assistance with navigation of the Swedish hosting service.

A seller on eBay was fraudulently offering a CD with lots of electronic plans. Many of these were obviously ESP designs because the titles on each matched exactly the headings used in the respective projects on the ESP site. When asked to remove the items, the seller responded with "No plans from your website are on our cd." - nothing else, no further explanation, nothing.

eBay has deleted his item(s) a number of times, and so far, so good.