Published: 27/1-2001
By Martin Lexow Wirak

An observant reader discovered that Hardware.no's BIOS guide bore a striking resemblance with a foreign BIOS guide. The reader contacted the website, which immediately posted a news message about us copying his guide.

The news spread tremendously fast, and several large non-Norwegian sites posted the news on their pages as well. We received hundreds of emails from foreign readers, protesting the alleged infringement of copyright.

We had some of our coworkers going thoroughly through both of the guides. Even though there obviously were differences between the guides, there still was no doubt; large parts of the guide were translated word for word.

A translation of this kind is a major intrusion to the rules of press ethics, while also being an infringement of copyright law.

Because of this, we removed the BIOS guide with immediate effect. While we are working on making a new BIOS guide from scratch, you may read the English "original", which can be found at Rojakpot.com.

We at Hardware.no firmly apologize the incident. The whole matter is a grave embarrassment for Hardware.no, and not least for the coworker who "wrote" the BIOS guide.

We will make sure our coworkers will be even better informed about how to proceed when writing an article, and we hope something like this will never happen again. Needless to say, stealing copyrighted material from others is not in sync with Hardware.no's policy.

On the other hand, it is impossible to completely protect us from this. We have a decentralized organization without direct control over every single coworker. Conclusively, it will be up to every particular coworker to make sure they follow our guidelines, and of course all other laws and rules that apply.

We would like to thank the reader who turned our attention to the similarity between the guides, and we once again apologize to Rojakpot.com.

Nesodden, 27th of January, 2001

Martin Wirak
Manager, Hardware.no