Iād like to take a moment today to say THANK YOU!
Thank you to all of my faithful subscribers and readers. And a special thank you to those of you who have chosen to use my curriculum in your homeschools. My family has been greatly blessed by your generosity and encouragement. I whole heartedly pray that my printables have blessed your family and your homeschooling endeavor.
Thank you!
To those of you who have gotten caught up in the popular groups that condone illegal file sharing, today my prayers go out to you.
Unfortunately there are groups of homeschoolers who are choosing to come together and āshareā files they are not permitted to share. It greatly saddens my heart to think that homeschoolers would do something like this. Maybe you simply arenāt aware, but hosting and sharing files (paid or free) that were not made by you is illegal without the express written consent of the author. Downloading these files is also illegal. What you are doing is called āstealingā in the online world.
You may have even justified your actions due to your budgetary constraints, or simply out of the desire to āget a good deal.ā I wonder how many of you would be able to walk up to your child and say āHoney, I really wanted this curriculum, but wanted to save money, so mommy stole it.ā Conversely what would you say if your child did something similar? I hope you can understand there are no excuses for this type of behavior.
Homeschooling isnāt just about academics, but instead it is our way of imparting our character, values, morals, ethics, spiritual beliefs, and life skills onto our children. Today my prayer is that you would be encouraged to check your ways and think twice before participating in these āsharingā groups. What you are doing is not only illegal and unethical, but you are also taking advantage of all of the bloggers and homeschooling companies that have put their valuable time and energy into creating products to help your homeschooling be more successful.
My pastor has always said that ācompromise always leads to more compromise.ā I pray diligently that you do not allow this small compromise to creep into other areas of your life. And most importantly I pray you are not passing down these values to your children.
Instead I encourage you to trust God to provide for you as He has lead you into this homeschooling journey. He will provide for your needs and make your paths straight. ~ Proverbs 3:6
Now may the God of peaceā¦make you complete in every good work to do His will. (Hebrews 13:20-21)
I have such an easier job because of what you and other homeschooling moms do and I want to take this opportunity to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I couldn’t do without your curriculum and I very much appreciate what you have made available for everyone out of the kindness of your heart. I’m so sorry you face this problem of “sharing”. It’s so easy to avoid if someone will pass the word about your website and let others download for themselves! You provided an open, honest, and well-worded response to those who either knowingly or unknowingly are breaking the law. God bless you and your efforts always:)
Thank you, Erica for writing this post! I’m sorry that you are being robbed of what is rightfully yours and others within your community of homeschoolers, don’t understand how important the budget of others are important.
As a blogger, I see a lot of this online as well when it comes to ‘sharing’ another’s work. If done well, and so many do it well, it leads to great traffic for the blogger who created the post. However, in some cases, the step of ‘getting written permission’ just doesn’t seem worth their ‘time to invest’.
I see that as a concern as well, as this robs as well.
I pray that your post will allow those who unknowingly realize that they are doing wrong and makes those who know what they are doing a little more uncomfortable.
Blessings!
So beautifully written!
I wanted to drop in and give you a word of support and encouragement. I love that plenty others were thinking the same thing.Sorry that this problem is effecting you Erica. We are big fans. I am so out of the loop I didn’t realize file sharing was still popular. I remember it was hot way back when we started homeschooling 11 years ago and trying to police what was fair use and what was not made me decide to leave that party. Good of you to tell it straight but difficult i am sure. I truly believe some don’t know it’s stealing and hope this helps. For the others I pray they are convicted with their sin. Hugs!
EXCELLENT!!!!
I love your blog and thank you for allowing my family to learn from your’s. Beautifully written.
I joined several freebies groups on Facebook because I thought they were just sharing links to things that are really free online. IMHO, things are getting out of hand and people are now starting to share passwords to sites they’ve subscribed to and things from their own computers via dropbox (like your curriculum). Once I started seeing the password and dropbox links this week, knew I needed to leave those FB groups!
Thank you Erica! Your blog is always inspiring. We purchased our PreK curriculum from you a couple weeks ago and are so excited to put it to use this fall. Keep it coming!!!
I am sorry that this is happening. I haven’t heard of the specific groups and hope that I am not a member of any of them. I know I belong to one that gathers and posts several public domain resources in one place, but I hope they aren’t actually doing something illegal. I have also bragged about your products online, and in person (my sis-in-law is a teacher at a Catholic school and loved the literature units š ), but I have only ever linked back to your homepage and told them to “click on the ‘store’ link.” I hope that I have not done anything illegal. I really love your products and just wanted to let others no about it š Please keep up the wonderful work you do, you have saved me unimaginable amounts of stress and provided great curriculum for my children.
Forgive my lack of knowledge, but I don’t know if I’ve done this or not. I have googled free worksheets and have used the free items off of websites, but I have no idea how to tell if they are offering those thing legally or illegally. I have only made copies from pages that specifically said free. I do not ever want to steal intellectual property.