I was blogging for two months I think when I spotted my first case of plagiarism. Someone else had copied one of my posts and pasted it onto his own website, without any link or reference to me.
Man, I was furious and I immediately contacted him and asked him to take the post down. He did in the end, after a bunch of angry emails and tweets from me, but it cost me a lot of time and energy. How naive I was … It wouldn’t be my last experience with content theft and I’ve learned to be a little less upset about it.
Content theft is becoming a bigger and bigger problem on the Internet. The percentage of plagiarized content on the Internet has risen from 25% in 2009 to 44% in 2011. That means that almost half of the web’s content is copy-pasted from somewhere else.
It’s one of the reasons why the new Google algorithms doesn’t take the literal copying of content lightly. A lot of sites that were purely based on content theft have been taken down in the search ranking or deleted from ranking at all. Original, new content, is favored and rightly so.
But we’re not just talking about blogs, it holds true for social media as well. A lot of the users repost, retweet and share content someone else has produced. If this trend continues, there won’t be much original content to be found at all; experts estimate that in 2014 the percentage of plagiarized content will be at 63%.
Check out these statistics:
[Click for Larger}
Have you had experiences with content theft or other forms of plagiarism?
[via Mediabistro]
Ben Miller says
Lots of bloggers complain about their content being copied and pasted without permission, and rightly so. But some of these same bloggers will use other people’s images on their own blog, without thinking twice about it. Remember that anytime you see an image online, whether it’s a photograph or a drawing, you have to treat it like its someone’s blog post. Unless they explicitly give you the right to use it elsewhere (with a Creative Commons license or similar), you are stealing if you use it on your blog. You can’t assume that everything that comes up in a Google image search is yours for the taking.
Rachel Blom says
Truth.
Jonathan Assink says
99% of the time when I use an image it’s one I took myself. On the rare occasions it’s not, I use creative commons images with links and attribution back to the original photographer.
I have all of my images on Flickr listed as all rights reserved. I used to have everything posted under Creative Commons, but too often didn’t get attribution credit. I freely share with anyone who asks (and I’ve had requests) but I’m tired of people not even taking the effort to grant attribution.