Then I looked around a bit more and saw the scenario repeated, but this time the blog's owner copied and pasted an entire article from a leading U.S. newspaper.
Too many people think that if they attribute where it came from, it's OK to copy and paste.
It isn't. It's not OK. It's stealing. The writers (or news companies) aren't paid for their content appearing on the lifted sites. Broderick Perkins, a real estate writer and the owner of DeadlineNews.com, has had far too many of his stories "lifted". So he has an explanation on his site regarding copyright and how people misinterpret this important law. I strongly recommend that anyone blogging have a look at it.
What can you do about plagerism?
When I teach about blogging, or participate in a class that someone else is teaching, I make sure I get the point across about plagerism. People - often even experienced bloggers - misunderstand about attribution and think it's OK to copy much or all of an article if credit is given. So I will set them straight and point them to Broderick Perkins' site.
CopyScape is one tool that can be utilized from time to time to see if your writing has been plagerized. There are free searches of your blog or site to see if duplicated content exists anywhere. When I've checked on Copy Scape in the past, luckily nothing's been amiss. I imagine if I had a large newspaper or magazine. I might want to subscribe to CopyScape's premium or paid subscription service so that I'd know my writing was not being swiped.
Are there any other solutions out there? I would love to hear from the community how else we can stem this ugly tide.
hhhhmmm, That's interesting. I will have to check out their site. Thanks for sharing.
Sean Allen
Okay so lets say you see something, love it, ask if you can reprint and attach a link to something where the original author gets credit and maybe sales (like additional items for sale at this website) how do you validate that you have this okay? What more needs to be said in the blog to verify you have authority and authorization to post a blog and lead people to the original author's work? Just wondering what to write that states this. Guess knowing you have a problem is good and correcting the behavior is even better.
Thanks in advance.
Mary - not sure what can be done other than to continue educating people about how wrong it is, and even WHAT it is, with reminders. Some will never get the message, and I suspect plenty of those who do plagiarize know exactly what they are doing but figure they (1) won't get caught, and (2) nothing will happen if they do.
I particularly like hearing from Lenn Harley who actively pursues these situations and who has received tens of thousands of dollars for copyright violations.
I had my stuff copyrighted AND I actively use the premium copyscape program. No far so good.
Thanks for the reminder for everyone.
Jeff
Funny you wrote this. I was just reading another agents blog where he copied 2 other peoples questions from other message boards. He really didn't elaborate or answer these questions so does this qualify as plagerism? Actually one was a question/comment and the other was a post about if we could predict the market.......
Interesting!
For ActiveRain, the blogger that is shown to have stolen significant content, text or images, should be dumped. Why they aren't, I can't understand.
One of the ActiveRain members that took one of my images and put it in a post and on her profile, was given a pass by the ActiveRain management and, in fact, they were rather protective of her. Perhaps she was ignorant of the law, I don't know. What I do know is that it took about 3 days to get my image off her blog. During that time, Google could have indexed that images to her blog. That's why I was so anxious. It was a weekend, but I know folks check their e-mail over the weekend. I was e-mailing ActiveRain and the member over and over and being totally ignored. Then, when the matter was settled, the post from ActiveRain was protective of the member who took my image, implying that some of the folks commenting to my blog about the incident were not very nice.
She did apologize. But, she was rather evasive about where she got my images. Shucks, no secret there, she got it from one of my blogs or web sites.
I agree 100%. The matter is very serious and I don't believe it will slow down as long as the copied material remains on the members' blogs and indexed to their credit on Google.
Beat the drum Mary. You'll get lots of support from me.
One of the remedies that I would suggest is to stop using the term plagiarism and call it what it is, COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. That is a federal crime. The copyright violators are criminals. I also like Literary Theft. That's a dictionary description of the word plagiarism.
I've personally flagged several posts here on AR in the last week that were blatant theft of an authors work. Those posts still remain. Frankly, I give up. I'll just ignore those posts from now on and not flag them or report them. I'll leave it up to the original authors to take action. I'm tired of beating my head against the wall.
What grinds me the most is that the person who has those posts on their blog is acting as if she didn't do anything wrong. The "woe is me" mentality even got some support after she posted a "pity me" blog. It blows my mind. Yet it still continues.. but now she tries to be crafty by copying & pasting from several different sources so that the entire post isn't showing up on one Google search but several. Meanwhile, as Lenn points out, she is getting the credit for authored works that she copied & pasted from other peoples hard work.
I have Google alert set up now, and use my keywords. If I find it happening to me personally I will go after them legally.
Hot button for me as well. I've written 2 posts on my experience and another post on how I'm trying to protect my slide shows.
I use Google Alerts and CopyScape to find them. I also watch the referral links both here in AR as well as my WP blog.
I suspect if you searched AR tags for 'plagiarism' the list of such posts would be long. The anonymous person above is right-on!
Frances - you are most welcome. Some don't know, some don't care.... But just like in real estate, the rule of thumb isn't "I didn't know, I'm not responsible". It's "know or should have known". This is definitely a case of "should have known".
Kay - You're welcome!
Sean - you're welcome too :-)
Karen - If you talk to the owner of the content you can simply post "used by permission". Of course best to get that in writing.
Jeff - amen. I was thinking of Lenn when I posted this.... She has had nightmares with her maps!
Maria - maddening, isn't it?
Lenn - I knew you and I were on the same page. That's awful about Google and credit! More the reason to go after them...
Charlie - information sharing is great. Do it with links, not copy and paste. That's all.
Bill - I believe that quoting one line and linking is ok. Copying 3 paragraphs and linking is not good enough. I'm not sure. I bet Lenn knows, though. Lenn, thoughts?
Anonymous - good point on Google alerts. I do the same thing!
Elaine - I bet you're right. Maybe I'll do such a search. I'm sure I could learn more!
Sandi - All work is considered copyrighted without your having to do a thing.
Mary, I can't appreciate this enough. The insight you bring to your profession is exemplary.
I spend several hours every week policing copyright violations. Largely due to the Internet, it's become part of my workload. Every story I post comes with two copyright notices and two links to my story on copyright infringement. Stories still get stolen. Sometimes they get stolen WITH the copyright notices. It's amazing.
One short answer to some questions posted here, when in doubt, get it in writing. If you want to use someone's work get written permission. (Pretty much like using anything that belongs to someone else.) It's a simple contract, like any other, signed by both parties, that specifies how and where you can use the work. Simple one-page contract forms exist or can be quickly draw up. Try Nolo.com, contract form services the real estate industry uses or your association's own legal eagles.
Given that most professionals are mandated to abide by a certain code of ethics (which forbid stealing) and given that much of what we all do in any profession these days is somehow related to information, content and the various forms of the written word, on and off line, every professional should know the basic tenants of copyright law. I'm wondering if continuing education classes in the realty profession offers some study on it. To answer some of the questions raised here, read it.
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/
Mary has encouraged me to now post that story on my new blog, my operation's back shop, the Deadline Newsroom at http://deadlinenewsroom.blogspot.com/ where you'll also find more stories that really hit home!
Mary, thanks again. Your post really hits home.
Broderick Perkins, Publisher
DeadlineNews Group
The cease and desist letter is of course a good idea. But I would not be too lazy to blow it off outside of my market area. Think of the Google rankings. It's not worth it to blow it off.
Broderick - thanks for your kind words and for stopping by! Of course we are on the same page. I'll visit your blog and site to see you post those links. They are invaluable and, as I said, I point people to them when I teach the subject. Thanks again!
Mary it is a problem. I just discovered a "blogger" about a week ago from a Google alert for something he plagiarized from MSNBC.com on one of the Realtor.com (Move Inc.) blogs, I thought this guy can write at first but then something in the article said "writer" not "Realtor." so I Googled to see who wrote it. Later in the day when I got a trackback on my WordPress.org blog to his Realtor.com blog I went to see why he would have linked to my blog. In plagiarizing something I wrote he left in one of the links to me. He deleted it but it still showed on Technorati and Google. He did not really delete it either he moved the entry and removed that link. Then he posted the same thing on a WordPress.com blog.
He has an RT blog with lots of plagiarized posts. One is a featured entry. He posted 13 entries on his RT blog the day he published the plagiarized one that is a featured entry. He's on AR too, has 4 entries with kersplats (red x's.) 4 out of 5 entries...
I called him last Sunday to tell him to take down the blog he'd used my entry on.
This guy is not quoting writers from MSNBC.com, the Motley Fool, RealEstateJournalOnline.com, CNNMoney.com and other real estate bloggers he is not providing links to the sites, he's just cutting and pasting to make it look like it's his. He does take some care to change some sentences around so it is not the easiest thing in the world to discover who he's ripping off with Google.
Maureen - tell Fran about the RT posts, she will put a stop to it there I'm sure.
Did he take down your stuff, I hope?
When I had the problem with the Czech Repuplic guy stealing 3 of my articles, I wrote about how I handled it with Google as well as a follow-up on my minor 'win'. (See my AR tag "plagiarism")
I also wrote about it on my outside blog. On that blog, the guy who writes plagiarismtoday.com commented and offered some advice for filing the claim. His blog is worth reading for anyone who wants to learn more about controlling the theives.
Mary,
Another service worth checking out is Attributor - http://www.attributor.com (also, a disclaimer in that I work for them) - Attributor monitors the web for copies of your content and then reports back matches in context including: what % of the article was copied, was a link back to the original source given and is there advertising on the page . We monitor AP and Reuters content and are already working with a couple of real estate web sites as beta customers.
Rich - OK, I appreciate the resource! Thanks.
I can understand the pressure to get content fast in this market place. Blogging is a relatively new means of communicating and the very nature of it is to "share" ideas. I have just got into blogging in the last month and although my content is my own, the time constraints of daily life in a competitve world make cutting and pasting very tempting when you are trying to get up and running.
The fact is that plagerism is not a new phenomenon. It has simply migrated to the internet community as an inevitability of life. The best we can do is to:
1) be sure to copyright our content
2) police our content to the extent that it is not copied and used verbatim
3) accept the fact that much of what is posted on blogs is not original content despite the fact that we wrote it ourselves. There is only so many ways to tell people how to stage their homes, for example.
4) be content knowing that people capable of creating original content will always do better than plagerists because a plagerized blog will by definition be less compelling to readers.
Mary,
Great information :)
Also, for those people who want to write something related to it, they can copy something about it and direct and they did not write it or they got it from an article or book or whatever author, etc , so they are not giving credit for that writing. Also another thing is to read for what they want to write and put it in they own words.
Ray Saenz