IBLCE will investigate complaints made against IBCLCs who steal others' material without crediting them.  If the suspected thief is not an IBCLC you would have to confront them or use some other avenue to make it clear that you don't condone or accept it.

Marianne's concerns are valid indeed; it shows a lack of respect for the fact that the presentation is not just what is on the slides. The slides are barely the tip of the iceberg, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily be given away for free. 

I take such requests on a presentation by presentation basis, and if I do share something publicly it is always text only, no illustrations since I don't have permission to do anything but show the pictures when I am giving a talk myself.  Personally I don't find powerpoint handouts very useful, because my memory only stores things that I myself have written down, at best.  If there is enough space on the handout for me to write down the things that I know will make the information stick in my brain, then it's all right, but I far prefer to make plain text notes on a pad of paper as the talk is going.  It leads to some discord if the speaker is an audio memory person and you can always tell if they are because they are really bothered by seeing people take notes in their talks, they think we are not paying attention when the opposite is true; I remember text much better than speech and I remember a talk much better if I have played stenographer throughout.   The same discord arises if the speaker is a text-memory freak and the audience is full of people who need a copy of the slides to feel secure.

I just attended a conference where we were given ppt handouts for nearly every presentation, and there were 8 or 10 slides per page.  A lot of them were complicated diagrams of fetal circulation, and embryonic development shown by 3D ultrasound, and bar graphs showing the different kinds of heart defects, for example, in one bar that was different colors for the different defects.  Deforestation by powerpoint, I call that.  The slides were meaningless on paper, esp when the originals were in four colors which all turn black when printed on a B/W printer.  The text could be read by an amoeba, if there are literate protozoans, but it was way too fine print for this mature woman!   Paper copies do make it more cumbersome for someone to use your material, and perhaps that is why they use them.  I doubt it, though.  I think speakers really believe they are helping listeners with these handouts.   If they are only printed on one side they make fine notepaper for the talk :-)

My own slides are so simple that it would be no problem for people to copy them down longhand while I speak.  I hope that if someone uses the same info for their own ends, they give me some credit, but if they don't there isn't a lot I can do about it.  If I find out, I think really nasty thoughts about them and hope something bad-smelling will take up residence in their kitchen cupboards or something equally effective.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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