The last couple of weeks, I’ve been following along on the Dervaes family’s/Dervaes Institute’s bullying of the urban homestead movement by claiming trademark status over the commonly-used, generic terms “urban homesteader” and “urban homestead”. You’ll note I categorically refuse to link to them (except as necessary, see below) and refuse to place any symbol next to those terms, period. They are, as always, welcome to come on along and try to send me a cease and desist letter in addition to those they’ve already sent out.

Last night, someone on the Facebook page devoted to collecting and disseminating information about this issue posted a rather amusing – and, for the Dervaes, illustrative of their hypocrisy – link to a post by Michael Nolan on his “My Earth Garden” blog.

Let’s backtrack a moment, and review the series of whiny posts the Dervaes made to their blog after things took off when they started this nonsense. One of those posts was entitled “What is Plagiarism?” (we’ll leave aside, for the moment, the fact that it doesn’t appear that any copying of the Dervaes’ lack of instructional content is particularly rampant, or that they don’t seem to understand the difference between trademark infringement and copyright infringement). Now, this sanctimonious post was no doubt intended to try to further their indefensible position. What it did was simply serve to be confusing to those of us who were wondering why on earth they’d be posting about an unrelated issue. Be that as it may, it was just as pompous as everything else they’ve posted. And, in another delicious dose of irony, that post itself was copied, in full, from the link given at the bottom of the post, where the Dervaes invited people to “read more”. It’s pretty redundant to invite people to read more at a link you’ve just copied verbatim without correctly attributing it, isn’t it (learn some MLA or APA styling, please)? Irony, like any other rich dessert, should be consumed in moderation.

However.

If you are going to post things like this, rattling your chains at the world and reveling in your victim mentality….perhaps you should not be lifting other peoples’ content word for word from their blogs – i.e., perhaps you should not be engaging in that very plagiarism you’re railing about in your haughty manner.

Perhaps, in fact, you should not be doing this. Because when you anger people and they start taking a very close look at you, they’re going to spot it when you steal content from other people. They’re going to spread the word about your hypocrisy far and wide via whatever means are available. And for the record, I took screenshots last night of the original and of the content thievery by the Dervaes, in the event they aim for some revisionist history denying that it occurred.

In short, they’re going to call you out over it, as well they should. Shame on you, for both the trademark fiasco and now this.