The Anonymous Widower

Electronic Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

I’m getting a lot of this lately.  What happens is that articles on this blog, get copied and put into other peoples’ web sites without attribution or a link. Wikipedia explains the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement as.

Plagiarism is not copyright infringement. While both terms may apply to a particular act, they are different transgressions. Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of a copyright holder, when material protected by copyright is used without consent. On the other hand, plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author’s reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.

But whatever it is I don’t like it and some of my readers have been moved to comment on my post on Cornflour.  Why that one was copied, I haven’t a clue?

So how can we stop it, mitigate the effect of the copying or even benefit from it?

In the first place, if your post is good English, (or French, Spanish, Mandarin or anything else for that matter), with lots of recognisable phrases, you will be a bit more likely find them.  I suspect that if I type “Electronic Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement” into Google in a few weeks, I’ll find a few copies of this article.

I have started putting a link into each post that links to the rest of my blog.  The reason is that they generally don’t remove the links, so if any reader finds it interesting, they might link back to the rest of your site.

But whatever you do, don’t complain to the perpetrators. They’ll only wind you up and do it more often.

As I said in one of my comments, there are much more important things in life, than trying to stop this minor irritation.

September 16, 2009 - Posted by AnonW | Computing | Internet