If you surf around looking for BPM blogs, you may have noticed something strange: my blog posts from here on Column 2 reproduced in their entirety and without permission on the blog of Mark Bean, the VP of Sales for an ECM/BPM-related vendor, Altien. I’m not linking to them or to the fake blog itself, called “Office 2.0 and ECM News”, since I am definitely not encouraging traffic.
This is a clear violation of my intellectual property and copyright, and I’m amazed that anyone who works in this industry would propagate such an openly fraudulent and illegal activity. Maybe that tells you something about how Altien does business in general.
I noticed this a few weeks back, but I only noticed that he started stealing the full posts (as opposed to significant chunks of them) with my Gartner coverage this week. I sent Bean a request this morning to stop stealing my blog posts, and he replied “Sure thing”, like I had asked him for the weather — no apology, no admission that he might have violated blogging etiquette, much less copyright law. I’ve asked him to remove all of my full posts from his site, although obviously there’s no law against him linking to any of my posts and publishing a short excerpt under fair use rules.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case, it’s also theft.
Update: According to Altien’s CEO, who left a comment on this post, Mark Bean is no longer in their employ. In my communications with Altien, it was clear that Bean’s activities do not reflect their general business practices.