You Know When People Value What You’re Doing When…
26th July 2009
…they start ripping off your ideas, designs, code or content.
I’ve been involved in the creative industry in some form or other for the last 10 years.
Whether it’s running my own web design agency, working with freelance graphic designers, illustrators, copy writers, web coders and photographers or perhaps advising on the strategic direction a business should take for its branding or online marketing.
Overall, it can be said that I’ve come across many people who produce artistic and creative work in the fields of design, writing, video, web or software: “creatives” as I call them!
The “creatives” I’ve worked with have produced work ranging from “wow” through to “that’ll do” but ultimately what they all have in common is that the work they produce has and continues to be; original i.e. it’s their own! Admittedly efforts may be influenced by trends in fashion or other creatives in their field of choice, but it’s certainly not plagiarized or blatantly ripped from the web. That’s one of the reasons why my company charges what it charges for the creative projects it delivers.
So, what I mean to say is; use us for bespoke work, then that’s what you’ll get.
However there’s people out there who don’t think or operate, as I do.
[Incidentally, it's worth pointing out at this stage that my team of creatives no longer includes people who present work to the "that'll do" standard!]
Plagiarism is Alive and Well on the Internet
If you produce original and readable content on your own web site such as articles or blog posts; which is exactly what internet business coaches like myself, bang on about all the time as the Holy Grail of strategies in order to build site visitor loyalty and high volumes of qualified traffic to a web site; then one of the downsides of doing so, is that less imaginative website owners, looking to find the same Holy Grail; are more likely to rip off your content and claim it as their own.
This practice is not only illegal under international copyright law, but is annoying, insulting and potentially damaging to your Google rankings under their duplicate content policies.
It’s a big problem for website owners that deliver original content.
So What Can You Do About It?
The quick answer to this question is “a lot” ranging from from a snotty request to remove it from the web through to court action. However, I’m not going to go into the whys and wherefores in this post.
Instead, I’d like to tell you a useful resource that constantly monitors the web and your website, compares the two and notifies you of potentially duplicate or ripped off content.
The cool tool I’m talking about is the popular CopyScape website.
Check it our for yourself, there’s a limited free service which gets you used to the service, you can add a warning logo to your web pages to forewarn potential plagiarizers and if brand and content protection are important to your business, then the commercia fee paying service is well worth the investment.
Give it a try at www.copyscape.com
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Tags: Blogging, Content and Desgn
Carl Strohmeyer Says:
I am plagiarized regularly. All I have to do is to take a phrase from one of my articles and place it in Google Search (Yahoo and MSN tend to ignore these sites and not index them).
Sadly many of these sites (especially one in particular I just found) display Google Adwords, and calls, letters, emails to Google does not stop this as they always find way of lying about how Google checks the sites out that they display Adwords in. What shows this to be a lie is that I have been denied Google Adsense based on content on the ORIGINAL and copyrighted articles (which are also much more regularly updated for accuracy, but then Google does not care about this either).
Once internet users start calling Google to the mat and stop using Google, this type of rampant plagiarism will continue so as to make money on illegal Adwords ads.
Reference:
http://american-aquarium.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-lies-dishonesty.html
26th July 2009
Amelia Vargo Says:
I use Copyscape regularly. It’s an excellent tool, and I would recommend it to anyone.
To the commenter above, may I suggest he starts using RSS as this gets indexed quicker than anything else, which should stop Google from thinking he’s the plageriser, when he’s actually the plagerised.
27th July 2009
Carl Strohmeyer Says:
Thank you Amelia for the RSS suggestion.
I already use some feeds, but I will add this too.
However I have my doubts it will stop Google from recognizing the wrong site, since my original content is often months or even years older than the plagiarized content sites (not to mention this is not a problem on Yahoo/Bing, only Google and then usually when Adwords/Adsense is present)
30th July 2009