Comments on: Plagiarists Blog Off!

By: M. Thomas Eisenstadt’s Blog » Blog Archive » Eliot Spitzer Plagiarizes in Resignation Speech

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:31:09 +0000

[...] and “misappropriation” of quotes. The lesson is, when there’s a dispute, then attribute. But maybe Eliot Spitzer should have been reading the blog. In his resignation speech the other [...]

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:47:41 +0000

Ok, there’s a lot to talk about here so I’ll jump right in.

When you talk about what to do next, I’ll assume you’re talking about if the person had not removed the work. With the post gone you can’t do much other than laugh at the reply they sent.

If they hadn’t removed the post, the next step would have been to file a DMCA notice with the host and get them to remove it for you. A DMCA notice works with hosts in the U.S. and hosts in the EU, Australia and elsewhere have similar laws. It requires hosts to remove infringing material or, potentially, be held liable for the infringement.

Needless to say, hosts are very responsive to that.

If you need, you can find stock letters on my site.

If that had failed, you could try a similar tact but get the site deindexed from the search engines with the same method. That almost always is a success.

As far as ways to guard against that type of abuse. There are many but without knowing the details of the case it is hard to give a good solution for it.

Since most of the content theft involves RSS feeds, there are many good plugins that can help RSS scraping including plugins to add digital fingerprints for copy tracking, plugins to redirect scrapers to a false feed and everything in between.

Regarding hand content theft, your best bet is still Google and Google Alerts. But there are new tools coming down the pipe soon. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, try using Copyscape or Bitscan to see if they can find copies of your work. Both are at least fairly effective at tracking down plagiarists.

Hope that this helps and let me know if there is anything I can do!

By: Bob Beaty

Bob Beaty — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:19:33 +0000

Much like pet ownership there are no rules for blogging. In a quest to keep a blog current, folks will try–or steal–just about anything. The hell of it, linking can accomplish the same thing and extend the discussion. About the only thing one can do is to ask for credit or the info be removed. Personally, I would probably publish the incident and the response. Calling a coward–or plagiarist– out usually results in setting the tone for now and in the future.

I find that these people usually don’t last long as if made a practice, folks much less forgiving than you will make their life a misery. And once that happens, the blog usually disappears.

The one good thing about the internet is that it keeps these mooks off the street. The bad thing is it gives them a voice. Hopefully as blogging and SM gains traction, it will self police.

Happened with chatrooms and message boards, so confidence remains high.

Remain an advocate. And take no prisoners…