Hey, That's My Blog!
"All of the sudden she made my journey hers. One of the most important things I did in my life -- she was trying to take it away from me."
The journey? An Ironman triathlon: 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and running an entire marathon (26.2 miles) without a break. Jeff Matlow, a triathlete from Santa Monica, Calif., had written a firsthand account of participating in the race on his blog, ironmanlife.blogspot.com. So imagine his surprise when a reader alerted him to another blog that recounted the same race experience. “She had actually ripped off complete paragraphs – and not stuff that somebody could even say was hers. She even used words that I made up!”
Matlow’s experience with online plagiarism is far from unique. Just recently the words of Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall were used without attribution, by no less than noted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (she apologized, while blaming an anonymous friend). A week before that, the blog TechCrunch uncovered just how easy it is to publish someone else’s blog or e-book as your own on Amazon’s Kindle publishing program, allowing the plagiarist to collect the subscription fee (Amazon pledged to purge the plagiarized materials from the service). As Web content expands and Internet publishing becomes easier, the number of online plagiarists is bound to increase. How can bloggers and other producers of Web content protect themselves?
The journey? An Ironman triathlon: 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and running an entire marathon (26.2 miles) without a break. Jeff Matlow, a triathlete from Santa Monica, Calif., had written a firsthand account of participating in the race on his blog, ironmanlife.blogspot.com. So imagine his surprise when a reader alerted him to another blog that recounted the same race experience. “She had actually ripped off complete paragraphs – and not stuff that somebody could even say was hers. She even used words that I made up!”
Matlow’s experience with online plagiarism is far from unique. Just recently the words of Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall were used without attribution, by no less than noted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (she apologized, while blaming an anonymous friend). A week before that, the blog TechCrunch uncovered just how easy it is to publish someone else’s blog or e-book as your own on Amazon’s Kindle publishing program, allowing the plagiarist to collect the subscription fee (Amazon pledged to purge the plagiarized materials from the service). As Web content expands and Internet publishing becomes easier, the number of online plagiarists is bound to increase. How can bloggers and other producers of Web content protect themselves?
Imitation not too flattering
Jonathan Bailey, author of Plagiarism Today, a Web site dedicated to the issue of online content theft, says plagiarism is a growing problem. He says he has stopped more than 700 plagiarists of his own work in the past seven years. “It is safe to say that pretty much everyone who publishes to the Web for any length of time will see their work misused at some point, if it hasn’t already without their knowledge,” Bailey says.
That happened to Erika Olson, author of a popular “Lost” fan blog, Long Live Locke. A reader left a comment asking if she was collaborating with a YouTube user, “Seanie B.” on his video episode recaps. Olson checked out the video and discovered that her episode analysis was being recited, word for word, without attribution. “My initial reaction was disbelief,” Olson says. “How could anyone be so bold as to just take another person’s words and pass them off as his own?”
The answer? “Sheer laziness,” Bailey says. “These are people who don’t feel their own work is good enough for what they want to be able to do and decide to take shortcuts.”
After Olson’s shock wore off, she e-mailed Seanie B., confronting him about the situation. “I became angry, but not nearly as angry as I was after receiving his response,” Olson says. “He denied having ever read my blog and stated that he would never take anything word-for-word from any other Web site.”
That reaction wouldn’t surprise Bailey. “The reason they don’t think they’ll get caught is because most don’t get caught,” he says. “The odds are against a random plagiarist getting caught on any one act. Every act of plagiarism is a game of Russian roulette … the more times one plagiarizes, the more likely they are to get caught.”
Unfortunately for Seanie B., Olson and her friends dug deeper into his video archive and uncovered many more instances when he had ripped off other “Lost” bloggers. For him, the game of Russian roulette was over.
Jonathan Bailey, author of Plagiarism Today, a Web site dedicated to the issue of online content theft, says plagiarism is a growing problem. He says he has stopped more than 700 plagiarists of his own work in the past seven years. “It is safe to say that pretty much everyone who publishes to the Web for any length of time will see their work misused at some point, if it hasn’t already without their knowledge,” Bailey says.
That happened to Erika Olson, author of a popular “Lost” fan blog, Long Live Locke. A reader left a comment asking if she was collaborating with a YouTube user, “Seanie B.” on his video episode recaps. Olson checked out the video and discovered that her episode analysis was being recited, word for word, without attribution. “My initial reaction was disbelief,” Olson says. “How could anyone be so bold as to just take another person’s words and pass them off as his own?”
The answer? “Sheer laziness,” Bailey says. “These are people who don’t feel their own work is good enough for what they want to be able to do and decide to take shortcuts.”
After Olson’s shock wore off, she e-mailed Seanie B., confronting him about the situation. “I became angry, but not nearly as angry as I was after receiving his response,” Olson says. “He denied having ever read my blog and stated that he would never take anything word-for-word from any other Web site.”
That reaction wouldn’t surprise Bailey. “The reason they don’t think they’ll get caught is because most don’t get caught,” he says. “The odds are against a random plagiarist getting caught on any one act. Every act of plagiarism is a game of Russian roulette … the more times one plagiarizes, the more likely they are to get caught.”
Unfortunately for Seanie B., Olson and her friends dug deeper into his video archive and uncovered many more instances when he had ripped off other “Lost” bloggers. For him, the game of Russian roulette was over.
