The purloined post
In December 2006 I wrote this post about Islam in Russia, and based on the search terms which bring people to this blog, it has been attracting a trickle of readers ever since.
Apparently it attracted more than that. In October 2009 a person going by the name of "Zimtor" re-posted my words here, without attribution (and minus the last two paragraphs). I know that it is common for bloggers to re-post chunks of someone else's work, but the norm is to cite the original and link to it.
Three days later a reader named "Cassie" did post a comment with a link to my original post, so that anyone who followed it could see that Zimtor's post was copied from mine. No one told me about it, however, and I only found out about it this week.
I wonder if there are any other cases out there of people copying my posts and passing them off as their own work. I've heard that such things aren't all that rare.
Apparently it attracted more than that. In October 2009 a person going by the name of "Zimtor" re-posted my words here, without attribution (and minus the last two paragraphs). I know that it is common for bloggers to re-post chunks of someone else's work, but the norm is to cite the original and link to it.
Three days later a reader named "Cassie" did post a comment with a link to my original post, so that anyone who followed it could see that Zimtor's post was copied from mine. No one told me about it, however, and I only found out about it this week.
I wonder if there are any other cases out there of people copying my posts and passing them off as their own work. I've heard that such things aren't all that rare.
posted by Infidel753 at 6:18 AM
10 Comments:
They're not rare at all. Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks around who are ignorant of copyright laws and don't understand that they also apply to the Internet. Most people don't know that the moment a work is created, it is in fact, copyrighted - whether or not the work is registered with the US Copyright Center, which I'm seriously considering doing.
Did you by any chance send a message to this blogger telling them to take it down?
Anyway, here's an excellent little guide to Internet copyright law - not too long and written in laymen terms.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
Right after the article, someone else posted this in comments:
Re: Islam dying out in Russia
Postby Cassie ยป Wed Oct 14, 2009 1:17 pm
Here are the links:
http://www.izvestia.ru/obshestvo/article3099512/
http://infidel753.blogspot.com/2006/12/ ... ussia.html
Did you confront the plagiarist?
I hate when people do that. I refuse to ever use any but my own words when writing. Like I once said, Tis a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done before.... ;)
I haven't done anything about it yet, especially since the re-post is two years old and probably hardly getting any more views now. I still might, though. Thanks for the tips.
Dude,I found a site recently that was posting ALL of my work daily including graphics and claiming it as his own. He was also doing the same for several other bloggers I knew so I alerted them to the plagiarism as well.
I notified his hosting company, served them with a legal cease and desist I found online, via email, and threatened his worthless ass. He took everyone's posts down within a matter of minutes.
He wasn't ignorant of the digital millennium copyright law, he claimed I gave him permission LOL..but interestingly enough,he couldn't locate the email where I gave it to him.
Dusty: Yeesh, if I caught someone doing that with my stuff, I'd be all over them. Sometimes one needs to be HMVB.
Well, don't let the bastard use your entire work either Infidel. It's wrong on every level and non-action sends the message that it's ok to steal the work of others.
Another blogger, Pamela Hart, and I uncovered several rightwing bloggers, and one in particular, who regularly engaged in copying and pasting other people's work from the internet and passed it off as his own. We told him we found him out, and all he did was call us names. Ha.
I've noticed over the past year, though, he no longer does it.
Some cultures have no concept of intellectual property copyright protection, if they physically can copy it, they can. My father-in-law's college text book has been reprinted (illegally) in China for years, he received no royalties from the forgeries.
China even has fake Apple stores selling I-devices, completely outside of Apple's licensing rules.
There's a joke about how many copies of MS Windows were sold to China... they only needed one, thank you.
DHMVB: At some point when I have time I'm going to take a closer look at that site and see if there are more purloined posts there.
SK: I remember that big fake-blogger episode. Excellent piece of work putting a stop to that guy, since he was stealing not only other bloggers' work but even unrelated people's identities.
RtS: I've heard of that problem in China. Maybe they'll change once they themselves start generating intellectual content worth protecting. In my case, at least, I doubt there's anything on my blog that the regime would want its subjects to see.
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