January 7, 2006

Content Theft.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Jim @ 8:04 pm

After doing the Google search that resulted in this post (the one about the increasingly widespread use of the term “farookin’), I was looking over the search results in more detail for shits and giggles. Not surprisingly, I found many of my own entries. However, I came across one of my entries, but the problem was it was not posted on my blog.

WTF?

I clicked on over to the site in question, and, sure enough, my December 9, 2005 post about Caviar appeared on the site in question in a December 18, 2005 post. As you can see from the screenshot, it was lifted word for word. I frankly was surprised at how angry it made me. I don’t claim to be Hemmingway, but if I write it, it’s mine.

I immediately fired off a comment in which I pointed out the blogger’s plagiarism and demanded that the post be removed.*** I also left a similar note on one of those message type boards that the site had in the left sidebar.

I looked at numerous other entries, and some of them seemed familiar to me. It turns out that the blogger in question has also lifted a considerable amount of content from my Helen Blogmeet buddy, Evil White Guy. I shot him an e-mail to alert him to the problem.

He responded today indicating that he had checked the site, verified that a good deal of his content had been lifted and that the blogger in question was also hotlinking his images. He noted that he anticipated taking action with the blogger’s hosting service.

As of this writing, the offending posts are still up (The blogger also lifted my “Happy New Year” post, which esstially consisted of one sentence), but the “Message Board” has been removed, comments have been disabled, and there appears to be no way to send the blogger an e-mail.

For the present, I would like to assume that the blogger in question (from Singapore) is simply not aware of the etiquette and the law that deal with plagiarism – not to mention the tackiness of it all. However, my comment, my note in the now-removed “Message Board” (both of which specifically identified the plagiarism), the disabling of her comments, and her failure to remove the offending material suggest otherwise.

Developing.

*** I was so angry when I wrote the comment that I misspelled the word “plagiarism,” which proves the rule that one should never write things one cannot change when one is very angry.

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