Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

… or so they say. In which case I guess we should be flattered that a competitor sailing school tried to imitate our website and even copied segments of text.

Athens Sailing Academy’s latest website contained pages with some almost identical copy to ours. And, to top it all, they were offering to supply a guide to choosing a sailing school – the one I wrote but with certain sections removed!

This was brought to my attention by one of our students and I’m very grateful to him.

I’m pleased to say that the owner of Athens Sailing Academy, Jonathan Chandler, has apologised and has now removed the plagiarised copy and the guide. Apparently it was put on his site by a Greek student and he did not know about it.

There is lots of interesting information available on the Internet and part of the philosophy of the web is to share useful articles.

If anyone reading this would like to reproduce anything from our blog or websites, here are some simple guidelines. This is the accepted procedure so you can apply it for other sites as well:

1. ask permission from the website or blog owner before you copy anything from their site

2. acknowledge the author of the item; do not pass it off as your own work

3. provide a link back to the author’s website

Providing links in this manner is useful to the website / blog owner. Normally, if you provide a link, you will not be asked to pay anything for using the copyright material and most authors are quite happy to have their work disseminated in this way.

You should note that the above applies to images as well as to text.