dumb·founded – adjective  - speechless with amazement; astonishment.

It’s not a word I use very often, but it’s the perfect word for describing how I feel after a series of interactions with a federal agency.  I keep trying to let go and move on to more productive things.  But I’ve never been able to let go of something until I understand it, or have a solution.  So I thought I’d share it and see if anyone out there has some suggestions.  And, since my recent experience has demonstrated that people can be dangerous, I’ll do this without sharing names or identifying information.  It involves plagiarism, copyright infringement, and state level federal managers choosing to not share information with ranchers rather than properly cite the inventor of a process that could save ranchers thousands of dollars.  It comes down to one of my core beliefs, that if I do good things people will respond respectfully, being crushed for no reason I can come up with.

It started in late August of this year.  I have several “google alerts” set up to let me know when my company, work or name appears somewhere on the internet so that I can see if there is anything I need to follow up on.  One day I got an alert that said there was a new video up on Youtube called “Cows Eat Weeds.”

“Huh!” I thought, “That’s the name of my video.  But I haven’t put a new video up.”

When I clicked on the link I was taken to a federal agency Youtube channel and I watched a very nicely done video about a project that a Conservation District had done during the summer of 2010 to teach two groups of cattle to eat Canada thistle.  The ranchers involved raved about the results.  One said that he usually spent $4,000 – $6,000 a year trying to control Canada thistle and not doing a very good job at that, so he was pretty excited about his cows being able to take care of the weeds.  The Conservation District manager also described what a great break through this was and how excited she was about sharing it with other ranchers so they could be more productive and profitable.

As I watched I was struck that the narrator used words from one of my videos verbatim, including a description of my training process basics, and the Conservation District manager also used my words as she described palatability and it’s impact on what animals will eat.  The video closed with credits acknowledging the public information officer who had written the script, the narrator, and the people who had filmed the footage.  But there was nothing about where they had gotten the training process.

Given the verbatim use of my video, I was surprised that my video was not cited, nor was their any mention of me, the person who invented the process they were so happy with.  I felt like someone had come into my office and stolen my work.

“Maybe it was just an oversight,” I thought.  So I called the Conservation District manager.  I introduced myself as “Kathy Voth of Livestock for Landscapes,” told her I had just watched the video and thought it was quite good  but wondered why they hadn’t acknowledged the source of her information.  She told me that the federal agency was the source  of the information and she mentioned the first names of the people she’d worked with, saying she just couldn’t remember their last names.  One was a friend of mine, and the other a colleague, and I’d worked with both of them to train cows to eat weeds.  So I found it hard to believe when  the Conservation District Manager told me she had never heard of me, and she had not used my training process.  I asked her some questions and ultimately she told me she had a copy of my video.  This explained the verbatim use of it in their video.  I asked her what the difference was between how she had trained cows and the process I developed.  Her response, “Well we had to figure out on our own what quantities to feed” didn’t really hold water for me because that’s something that changes with each training.

Next I called the public information office responsible for their video’s script.  I introduced myself as I had before, complemented the video, and then said that I had just one change to suggest.  I told him that given their use of my materials and process, it would be appropriate for them to acknowledge that at the end of their video by providing my name and web address.

I was shocked when he told me that I was just mad because I was trying to get free advertising.  ”What!” he said, “Are people only allowed to do this if they hire you?!”

“No,” I said, “It’s great if they do it on their own.  That’s why I make instructional videos and why I wrote the book to tell people how they could train their animals themselves.  You can even make videos showing your success.  You just can’t present the process as if it were your own idea.”  I went on to explain to him that copyright law prohibits the federal government from holding a copyright, and if they presented my work as their own using my words verbatim, not only was plagiarism a problem, but they would also be putting my copyrighted work into the public domain, eliminating my ability to make a living.

His response was that I hadn’t really invented anything.  It was all just logic.

That actually took my breath away.  I was dumbfounded.  On the one hand they were so excited about the process that they made a video and posted it on Youtube.  On the other hand, he said it wasn’t a breakthrough, not a new invention.  I felt like Alice fallen down the rabbit hole and talking to some strange creature in Wonderland.  Most of all, his belligerent attitude surprised me.  I’d been a public affairs officer for the Bureau of Land Management for 6 years, and I had never been so rude to a member of the public.  And what do you say to someone who says, “Well how do I know you’re the inventor?  I’ve never heard of you before!” and refuses to check out any information you send him.

As we spoke, I found out that he had a copy of my video, given to him by the Conservation District manager.  ”Oh, I thought that was just something done by a student,” he said, as if that made what he had done any more legal.  It did make me wonder if they were making pirated copies of my video and so he didn’t have the case with all my contact information.  Of course, that’s something I will never know.  But, at that point he finally realized that maybe he was on thin ice, and he agreed to pull the video from Youtube until changes could be agreed upon.

Next I called the State Level manager to register a complaint about how I had been treated and about changes to the video.  She called me from the road, agreed that I had been treated inappropriately, and that the video should be withdrawn until it could be corrected.  I also called my lawyer, who had helped me with a copyright violation earlier in the year, and asked him to get ready to write a letter on my behalf.

Over the next few days I did a little more research.  I spoke to my colleague and learned that he was the one who gave the video to the Conservation District.  My friend who worked for the federal agency called me at the direction of the Assistant State Level Manager.  She told me that she had been the one who met with the Conservation District manager and her ranchers to talk about training cows to eat weeds, and she had shown them the video and answered their questions.  She couldn’t explain why the Conservation District manager said she had never heard of me, or why she couldn’t remember the person’s name who had told her how to train cows to eat weeds.  She also said that the Assistant State Level Manager wanted to know what it would take to make me happy.

I decided it was kind of “High School” for an Assistant State Level Manager to have someone else call me, so I called him myself.  We had a very cordial conversation and I explained that all I wanted was for my work to be appropriately cited and that I’d be happy if the video included my name as the inventor of the process they used along with a link to my website so that people who needed more information could find me.  He said he felt badly that I was having to pay the expense of a lawyer to write a letter, but I told him that since we were dealing with legal issues, it would protect us both to have my lawyer send the letter.  We ended the conversation by agreeing that he would call me and let me know the status of the issue, and that they would respond to my lawyer formally.

After a month I had heard nothing, so I left a message with the Assistant State Level Director.  He was in the office three days that week, but did not call me back until two weeks later.  I was in the field the day he called.  His message said he wanted to get this taken care of and that we should talk.  He was out of the office at 4:30 when I called back and left a message.  I’ve never heard from him since.

Ten days after that last call, I found the video on their Youtube channel again.  They had made changes to it so that it no longer used verbatim passages from my video and didn’t describe my training process basics.  Well done!  Then came the credits:  ”For more information on the process used contact Kathy Voss.”  Really?  They couldn’t get my name right?  Then up came my web site address, spelled correctly.  That was followed by this disclaimer:

“The NRCS provides a link to this site because it may contain related information of interest to you.  This link does not constitute an endorsement by the NRCS of any information, products or services on this site.  The NRCS is not responsible for the accuracy or timeliness of this information and recommends that it should be only used for evaluation and research purposes only.”

I’ve included a ton of citations in my work over the last decade, and I have never included a disclaimer.  The purpose of citing sources is to acknowledge to your readers/viewers that you have used or been influenced by someone else’s work.  It allows readers/viewers to see how you arrived at your conclusions, adds credibility to your work, and allows readers to draw their own conclusions as well.  In this case, the citation was particularly important because, according to US copyright law, their video was a derivative work, and thus infringed upon my copyright.  And unfortunately, at this point, I know way more about all this than I ever wanted to know.

When I clicked over to the agency’s web site to get the email addresses I needed to contact the state level manager again, I found that the video was advertised at the very top of their front page, with a link to the video and to a page with a reprint of the narrative and the disclaimer.  It seemed to me they were pretty excited about this work.  I emailed the state level manager about the problems with the video:  the misspelling of my name, and the inappropriate disclaimer.  She responded with a note that the video would be taken down again and that we would speak on Monday.

On Monday the state level manager and I spoke.  She told me that they did not want to cite my work per my request, and had decided to take the video down because they’d already spent too much time and money on it.  She said, “All you want to do is sell your book.”

I laughed, saying, “The book is $38 online!  I’m certainly not going to get rich selling it.”

Again, I tried to explain to her the importance of properly citing my work, and of copyright law.  I also told her that I knew that one of the herds trained in this project had not learned well.  If they had called me, I could have solved their problems and made them successful.

I told her, “That’s why you want people to be able to contact me. Not only do I have 7 years of experience training cows to eat weeds, I also have over a decade of animal behavior experience that makes me an expert.  I can make sure people are successful cow trainers.  That’s something you can’t offer.”

Her response was that it didn’t matter because “This isn’t even a proven technology so we’re not going to tell anyone about it.”

I was confused by this point.  After all, I had worked with representatives of this agency throughout that state, training about 5oo animals to eat Canada thistle, leafy spurge and spotted knapweed.  One of those staff members had been required by the agency to attend numerous conferences to show my video and talk about the results. I had even provided her with a poster and handouts for her presentations.   I had also written the grant for one of their offices to train cows to eat dalmatian toadflax, and then they had taken the money but not hired me to do the work.  Nevertheless, I assisted them to use my process and the cattle successfully learned to eat the weed.  Now the agency had created a video, and then advertised it with top billing on their web site.

I pointed all of this out to the state level manager.  I also told her that the research has already been done about the efficacy of using grazing as a weed control method.  We’ve long studied the effect of weed -grazing by sheep and goats, and those results can be extrapolated to cattle.  Again, that’s one of the important things about the scientific process that includes proper citations. When properly done, one can take results and then extrapolate them to other, similar technologies.

Presented with this, she decided that because I had worked for separate offices in her purview and not for her directly, we had no real relationship.  Then she told me she had already spent an hour on this and that was too much.  I suggested that given the potential contribution to a rancher’s bottom-line as expressed in their video, this was an important hour.  I suggested that I could provide her natural resource scientist with information that would help them understand how the use of cattle as a weed management tool is currently covered by science and that then we could talk more in the future.  She didn’t agree or disagree, but ended the call saying, “Well, have a happy Thanksgiving anyway.”

Dumbfounded.  That’s how this all started, and that’s how it has ended.  As the person who invented a technique for turning cows into weed managers, I didn’t expect to be flooded with riches, but I never expected this.  Wouldn’t you think that if you came up with a technique that could eliminate a $4,000-$6,000 expense per year for hundreds of ranchers that you’d be praised, not made into the bad guy?

This outcome truly troubles me, not just because of its impact on me, but because it represents behavior by federal officials that I had never expected.  So, as I said when I started, if you have thoughts or suggestions, I’d surely appreciate them.

Thanks for your time!