Monday, September 10, 2007

Shocked and Awed By Plagiarism

Last week I wrote about being plagiarized. Jonathan at plagiarismtoday.com suggested I set up a google alert. I've done that. The very same article was plagiarized again today. The article is posted at e-zinearticles.com so we all know those are free to use if the person who uses them attributes properly. The people who are copying these are dumb scam artists too because all they need to do is post the original author's name and leave the links intact.

I've posted on the offender's blog reminding them of the rules. The reason I keep seeing who is stealing this article is because my name is embedded in the article in a link so when anyone prints my name online, I get an alert. The scam artists are not very smart because not only are they stealing free articles but they aren't reading them to see that the original author's url is embedded in the article. It's not like it's hidden; it's pretty blatantly there!

It really makes me wish I could slip my name into everything I post online. I would probably be shocked at the number of hits. While it's wonderful to think I'm being emulated as that must mean my article is well written, this is actually starting to really tick me off.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I eventually had to give up on chasing those articles, Dana. It annoys me, but it takes up too much time. If you want an easy way to keep track, set up a Google Alert with your article title, then you will know when it's published somewhere and can check that it's properly attributed.

Anonymous said...

It's a paradox that these scrapers are smart enough to recognize good content but not smart enough to read it! Perhaps they choose the articles to steal on the basis of popularity or feedback from others. And they're certainly not honorable enough to give proper attribution.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry that this keeps happening to you. Something similar happened to a friend of mine a few months ago, except they didn't just scrape a few articles -- they scraped the entire site (including a few guest posts I had written for her).

I probably don't check for this problem nearly as often as I should.

Unknown said...

How do I do that Dana?

Dana Prince said...

Thanks for your comment Kiwi. Sorry, I don't undersaand your question. How do you do what?
Thanks :)
Dana

Anonymous said...

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Thanks!