In the months leading up to the last eclipse, I found people borrowing very liberally from my solar eclipse web site. By that I mean they borrowed and republished my eclipse description on their web site in whole without permission. In general, professional publishers always write and ask permission. For example David Reneke, the Port Douglas eclipse festival site, and Cairns Japanese language magazine etc all wrote and obtained permission from me before using material. I gave permission and I even proofed the republished material for them.
Major infringements I discovered included
A Cairns based booking engine who republished my entire 2012 eclipse article complete with photos with my copyright watermark as a hook for their booking engine.
A religious whack job in the USA bible belt used the eclipse article of my site with my name clearly visible to add credibility to her theory that the eclipse marked the beginning of the "Great Tribulation," the return of the anti-Christ. She posted a 14 min YouTube video with her voice over her scrolling around my site pulling bits out of context. I couldn't get her video pulled because I didn't agree with it or because it was untruthful but I got her on the copyright infringement.
The day after I got her video shut down, she posted another using someone else's eclipse site. I wrote to the owner and he too put in a copyright infringement complaint. Game over.
Another religious whack job here in Australia - another end of the world guru cashing in on peoples fears published some of my material then had the audacity to write to me afterwards to tell me he'd done that and hoped I didn't mind.
There were numerous other violations I discovered. I quickly evaluated each one and decided how much I wanted to pursue each one.
It is theft but theft of intellectual property as has been pointed out. There are a series of articles on the Australian Copyright Council Site that are very informative.
http://www.copyright.org.au/find-an-answer/
Joe Cali