Blog Plagiarism — a problem?
This story landed on the front page of Slashdot today, so I decided it was worth talking about. The blogger at PlagiarismToday made a pretty in depth post about the issue along with proposed solutions.
Here is the problem — there are many bloggers out there (and forum poster too, I might add) that repost large chunks if not entire articles, only adding a few of their own comments. The writer points out that there is often no reason to visit the source, and instead just read that main blog.
If you do not own the copyright to something, you can only republish so much as permitted by fair use while sourcing the original article. That means a few sentences. It also may mean a thumbnail size image leading to the original picture (however, this is a grey area since Perfect 10’s lawsuit against Google.)
Should you be worried about another blog quoting your work and linking back to you? No!
Bloggers intentionally post high quality or controversial things specifically to get other bloggers and websites to link back to them.
I’m suspicious about this claim, specifically — “Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source.”
Blogs work because they are super-targeted news channels. A good blogger not only writes their own (semi-)original content but also feeds relevent news stories to his or her readers. Someone only interested in SEOing their e-commerce site may have little interest in my publishing blog. Even then, the differences between Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com and Search Engine Roundtable are huge. While Aaron writes wide marketing articles tieing into SEO, Search Engine Roundtable covers all the little details on everything from YPN doing direct deposit to releases of new SEO magazines.
What this means is that when one channel (another blog) heavily quotes you, if that reader really is interested they will follow the link and could become a regular reader of your channel (your blog.) And yes, sometimes they drop the original channel that led them there.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying copy other people’s blog posts and newspaper articles as much as you want. What I am saying is that when someone copies some of yours, and links back to you, it is a good thing, not a bad thing. As for your own actions, just follow copyright law and you will be fine.
While I largely agree that mass quoting isn’t a bad thing, one of the reasons I carry a Creative Commons License, some bloggers do carry it much too far. Some reproduce whole posts with only footer links. While I have no personal problem with this, thus my license, others do and I understand.
Recent studies regarding click through relationships for blog syndication Blogburst are conflicting. Some report less than 1%, others, as high as 30%. Who’s right? I don’t know yet.
However, I suspect that there’s a point in which content reuse active discourages follow up. Where that point is was one of the topics I was trying to raise.
As far as following copyright law, it’s worth noting that a lot of ethical blog quoting goes beyond the bounds of strict fair use. If the Web followed the letter of the law, there’s be almost nothing left…
Just a thought.
Comment by Jonathan Bailey — May 22, 2006 @ 8:53 pm
I agree that some do push it over the edge; I saw a recent example where a blogger was reposting another blogger’s entire post and simply adding a few sentences of comments. Worse, they were doing it with every single post. However, this is certainly rare in my own experience.
As far as clickthrough rates, I think what is more important is quality not quantity. I know that some influencial people read this blog; that is a lot more important to me than 1000 uniques in one day from a multi-level marketing forum.
The one thing that does bother me is when someone does not reference the source. I don’t care if they use one sentence or three paragraphs, if they don’t name and link to me, then I’ve got a problem (or even worse, if they claim it as their own, but thats a different issue altogether.) Once a tv station quoted one of my sites, referencing it as “a website.” In fact, the same thing happened with another tv station just last month. I was referenced as “online.” Yeah, that pisses me off.
Comment by Andrew — May 23, 2006 @ 12:25 am
Reading other blogs on the same topic could easily lead to plagiarism. But then don’t you have the whole “duplicate content across different sites” issue from an search engine perspective?
If readers read enough blogs on a similar topic, they are bound to find blogs that just plagerize others and drop those from their reading list.
I find reading other blogs gives me great blog articles myself - not because I plagiarism but because of “hey, I never thought of that.”
For instance, if I’ve have a long day but need to feed my debt reduction blog a new entry so the search engines keep coming back for more food, I’ll look into similar blogs and pick some random archive date from at least 4 months back. Then I read through and look for ideas. This way, I’m not one more blog spouting the same content on the same day.
What I’m not doing is posting news…yeah, like I need one more blog posting the same news.
Comment by chris — May 23, 2006 @ 9:10 am
Generally I don’t like anyone to just copy my whole post and repost it on their websites, but I tolerate it if they give me at least a backlink.
It would be better if they would just copy some sentences, as you said. I do it this way, or I rewrite large parts and sum them up in short sentences.
It would be better if everyone would think before copying a post…
Comment by anty — May 23, 2006 @ 4:19 pm
Podcasting is beginning to supplement the marketing efforts of many marketers. Just as with any emerging technology, we are going to find new ways of using the “next new thing” every day! One example: I just found out about the way a press release distribution service (www.prweb.com) taking podcasting to new places. This was inevitable! “Podding” may be a fairly “new wave” marketing tool, but it’s already it’s evolving new mutant strains. PRWeb has just become the first ever provider of “open source” pod content. It’s done under something called a Creative Commons license—and it rocks! Take any of the podcasts they make available and slice ‘em, dice ‘em, stir ‘em, shake ‘em… do anything you want with the content. Make it your own. You can string podcast interviews together to make a news program, add a podcast to a Power Point, add music to the audio, insert your own comments, use the podcast as the soundtrack to a video… it’s all their for you to play with… and it’s free. Check it out at http://prweb.com/. Look for:
”PRWeb Podcasting Creates More Visibility…” We can all have fun with this.
Comment by Mark Alan Effinger — June 2, 2006 @ 2:18 pm