They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. However, when a person is stealing your hard work and making money off of it, it’s hard to take it as a compliment. Plagiarism is one of the most serious issues facing bloggers today and it is a fight that is nearly impossible to win and oftentimes hard to detect.
The most common form of blog plagiarism is content stealing. It all starts when individual people or companies set up a website and then subscribe to RSS feeds from other blogs that are similar. Using these other blogs’ posts, the content stealer copies whole blog entries directly onto their site and tries to make it appear that the writing is their own. Then, by subscribing to advertising services they make money off of other people’s work. One of these services, google adsense, offers advertisements based on the site’s content and reader traffic. This means that the quality of the content they take increases the amount of revenue they make.
A well known example of this came a couple of years ago from the blog, Bitacle. The Spanish based startup started stealing other blogs’ content and allowed comments to the posts on their site to give the impression that the text was original work. So many bloggers were affected by Bitacle that the entire blogging community joined together in a fight to stop the site, eventually even leading to the creation of the website stopbitacle.org.
More recently, our own beauty division blog has fallen victim to content stealing on Popular Beauty News. Scrolling down the two beauty sites, the content appears to be identical, but no credit is given to Pierce Mattie or its bloggers for its content. While our Chief Blogger, Shannon Nelson, has made various attempts to stop this continued violation by Popular Beauty News, so far no progress has been made. It seems her comments and formal complaints have fallen on deaf ears.
With no one to monitor and enforce the law on blogs, it appears for now that blog stealers are winning, but for bloggers like Shannon, whose work they’re stealing, the battle is just beginning:
"I won't tolerate this violation of copyright and plan to see to it that each person who does steal my work is dealt with in an appropriate manner."
Look for Shannon’s upcoming post on content stealing tell all, including how bloggers can find out if their content has been stolen and what they can do about it.
Photo Credit: SC Maricopa
Posted by Suzanne Davis on August 20, 2007 10:46 AM
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