This week I received an e-mail from a gentleman who said he was with the Center for Seabees and Facilities Engineering, and that they wanted to request our permission for the Department of the Navy to use one of our copyrighted articles. Specifically, he wanted to reprint the article Tom wrote for Tropical Boating on Anchoring in 4 Easy Steps in a training handbook for Navy sailors undergoing training to operate small Navy boats. They requested, as part of the permission, the wording of the credit line we would want to be included with it.
Of course, my first reaction was that this is some kind of scam or spam. But I checked the e-mail headers, and the email originated from a navy.mil server. Then I checked the originating IP address, and it’s registered to the Department of the Navy. And a quick Google search revealed that the Seabees do have a facilities center in the California city that was in the sender’s sig line.
I gave the permission, after checking with Tom to make sure he had no objection. The intended use seems to be for a printed handbook, but I’m kind of hoping that they re-publish it online somewhere. Tom initially said “no online use” — his concern was that if the Navy published it, people would think we stole the article from the Navy. But I made it a condition of our permission that any online use would not only include the credit line, but that the credit line would include a link to Tropical Boating.
Whether they’ll ever use it online or not, I have no idea. But if they do, we’ll get a .mil inbound link to Tropical Boating. And Tom can truthfully say that the Navy is using him as a resource for training its sailors.
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