A Poets View

Photo courtesy of www.leadingessays.com

Plagiarism is rampant across the Internet.  When it happens to you it seems as though you are the only one experiencing it however you are not alone.  With so many websites and blogs saturating the Internet it is likely at some point and time you will be plagiarized.

Plagiarism is simply the stealing of another person’s ideas and words then passing them off as your own.  As writers, when we research stories it is necessary that we use citation on photos, quotes, sentences etc…  For photos I always like to just mention the website and sometimes with a clickable link to the site.

On Sunday, as I always do, I began preparing some writing for the next day.  I also do my advertising on that day and all the incidentals that go along with writing a blog.  One of the things I always do is go to Copyscape (just Google it to bring up the site)  and check all my blogs and websites.  I do this because I was plagiarized once before on Poetry.com so I regularly check that site.  While checking my A Poet’s View blog to my horror I found two separate blogs which had almost all of my recent posts copied and altered on each blog to include photos and the affiliate links that I post with my blogs.  These blogs which copied my content are: http://duhos.info and http://davbyrne.info

Take a look at my A Poets View blog then take a look at each of the blogs I’ve mentioned and you can clearly see what they have done. 

They’ve copied my content and altered the phrasing which basically was smart on their part because by doing so if there were any legal action taken I would have to prove that the original content was mine.  What they obviously do not know is that I can easily prove this content to be mine just for the fact alone that I have affiliate links on the posts which are only available to me just as with all of your blogs they are only available to you. So, this is also a good lesson on getting those affiliate links on each of your posts.

Of course I was infuriated and as I always mention on this blog act with your heart and not your ego, well I did not take my own advice.  I basically wrote a firm and threatening letter to the email address associated with these two blogs and basically told them to get the posts down or I’d contact my attorney.

Back to the lessons on plagiarism.  It is a crime and is punishable by legal action.  The first thing you should do when someone blatantly steals your content is write to them and nicely ask them to take the content down.  Of course in my case, I was not nice at all and I do not intend to be in the future.   Give them a reasonable time to take the content off the site which could be one to two weeks.  Again, I told them ASAP which means NOW! If they do not remove the content you can either ask them to cite you, the original author as the source or you can write to the host server and report that your work was plagiarized.  I passed on all of these and went for the kill.  If none of these actions work then you talk to an attorney.  Exactly what I did.  I have many friends who are attorneys.  Here are a couple of links which are very informative in copyright law and the inner workings of plagiarism.  Copyright Law and Plagiarism Website .

The next thing to do is check out the Whois site where you can type in the domain name of the plagiarist site and find out who and where they are.   If they are in your neighborhood you can easily go buy rolls of toilet paper at Safeway, write PLAGIARIST all over the toilet paper then toilet paper their house. See I’m covering my behind again using affiliate links in my post.  If you do not have a Safeway near you click the link below.

In my case, the domain name was registered to someone in Russia so I guess the toilet papering is out.  The Whois site gives you all sorts of information including addresses and phone numbers.  With this information you can contact them directly.  Again, in my case I’m not calling Russia though I am close to Alaska so I may give S. Palin a call and see if she could deliver a message for me.  I’m being sarcastic to hide the anger here.

In any case I will keep you updated on what happens with this situation and I also wanted to mention that a few of the posts on both of these sites looked familiar to me so you may want to check them out thoroughly.

I will be really interested to see if this post shows up on their sites.  So far all my posts have so this should be interesting.

Two things I’d like to mention here:

First - Being angry doesn’t solve anything.  Remember you can choose your reaction to situations good or bad.

Second - I guess I should be flattered.  The fact that they would want to steal my writing only shows they have good taste though they are not very intelligent.  My personal suggestion to the plagiarist - Learn how to spell and use correct grammar so that when you are caught you may be able to get away with this crime.  Yes, it is a crime.