Writers: You’re Going to be Ripped Off

A letter to Writer’s Weekly reminds us of one of the unfortunate truths of the information age:

I was immediately drawn to this warning. I recently found an article of mine on a blog located at blogspot.com. The title was changed, but the rest was verbatim, with no credit to me, the copyright holder, or the magazine it appeared in, and certainly no permission from me. (There were other articles from this same magazine on the site.)

This “blogspot.com” seems to be powered or hosted by something called “Blogger,” but I can’t find a link anywhere on their site to complain about copyright infringement. On top of that, it appears the blogger makes money from advertising clicks. Have any suggestions how to stop this?

This is a tough situation. Sadly, this writer and a lot of others are being taken advantage of every day. Plagarism is an everyday occurence online, I think it’s really a dark figure.

I had my incident with plagarism earlier this year when I found someone on an MSN Spaces blog in Malaysia ripped off my article on “The Truth About the Chronicles of Narnia,” only bothering to change two words (one was theater to cinema.) The only reason I found it is that the plagirist left tags in the post which included my blog’s URL.

For me, it’s almost impossible to police: more than 2,500 blog posts, hundreds of columns, are you going to tell me that this was the only time I’ve been used without attribution? Probably not. But what am I going to do, conduct searches for all my pieces? It’s simply not reasonable. I also can’t expect Google to do it for me, either. I could search for some of my most popular items, but even that has limited appeal.

I found one person who is using “The Liberal Ten Commandments” without permission but with attribution, so I’ll let it slide.

The big thing is that if you become aware of someone ripping you off, you’ve got to come down hard and maybe even document how hard. The MSN Spaces blog that I complained about was down within 48 hours. And I think if this writer follows the advice given to him (contacting Google) he’ll find that site is down in equally short order. If plagarists when caught pay a price if they don’t come clean, it’ll be a deterrent. But you’re not going to catch everyone and as a writer you’re going to drive yourself nuts trying.

Plagirism

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