Plagiarism in the blogosphere

plagiarism (plj-rzm)

(n) a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work 2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone’s words or ideas as if they were your own – Dictionary.com

As of late, TipMonkies has been receiving a great deal of attention, and is being read by more and more people every day. This makes me happy, but it brings up the problem of plagiarism. Since I first started blogging probably about 5 or so years ago (that blog, Martinworld.com is now defunct), a lot has changed in the blogosphere. First of all, it received a name, which I guess makes it feel more like something special than what it really is…writing mindless dribble on a webpage. More importantly, people began respecting other people’s work a little more. Things like trackbacks were invented which notified a blogger when their content was reposted. People began to credit their sources at the end of posts in various ways (either a “source” or a “Via” link being the most common). Then something happened, which changed everything…or at least, changed things for a few folks. Blogs began to make money.

I’m not saying more people began to blog simply because of the possibility of making money. In fact, I’d say most blogs are created simply to be able to have your voice heard (err…writing read?) even if just by a few friends. Communities like Xanga and MySpace are good examples of this. The majority of blogs are, in fact, nothing more than the ramblings of a teenager pissed off because they couldn’t go to THE party (don’t feel bad, I’ve been there myself). What I mean by blogs making money is that as the medium became more popular, advertisers began to want to attack niche markets more and more. The latest figures I’ve read state that over $100 million (USD) is put into blogvertising every year. I’d be willing to say that figure is probably three times as large. Some folks began creating blog networks in order to make some money. Popular examples include Weblogs Inc., recently acquired by AOL, and Gawker Media, who recently made a syndication deal with Yahoo.

Now don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with making money of your blog. I have ads on TipMonkies, and many bloggers nowadays use at least some form or another of advertising, with Google Ads and lately Chitika, some of the most widely used. It’s nice to be able to put ads on a site, even if it only pays for hosting. No, my problem is not with making money off blogging, it’s making money off someone ELSE’s blogging. Enter SurferDiary.

This company has been reposting articles from TipMonkies for the past several days…since Friday in fact. Now I don’t care if someone paraphrases an article, or quote it, or use it as a source for their own article, but when you repost and entire article without (A) using the name of the original author in the post, (B) not linking to the original source, and (C) not abiding by the license used to publish the information, THAT is not only wrong, it is stealing. Now we use a pretty liberal license (the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license) which allows for republication with certain conditions, and I probably could technically overlook this one site since they’ve only reposted a couple of articles, if it weren’t for the fact that not only are they taking our content, but they are claiming that TipMonkies is (A) part of their network, and (B) our content which they republish is their copyright! What nerve!

TipMonkies is not a giant site, but it is large, has grown extremely quickly (from 1,400 hits when we started 6 months ago, to close to 3,000,000 for the month of November!) and has received its fair share of media attention. I could only imagine the kind of crap which larger sites and networks must go through in order to keep their content theirs. Using other bloggers’ feeds or content on your site isn’t wrong per se, but using it to profit from their work is, and we need a solution.

I propose that blogging software like WordPress, TypePad and others connect some sort of encrypted key between their software and the server on which it is being used, ensuring that the information is displayed only on the original site. RSS feeds would still be able to be displayed within various aggregators (desktop or web-based) by sharing this key with the aggregator’s backend. The original author could choose to allow an aggregator service to gather the feed or not. Some might think this might cause problems by keeping certain aggregators from receiving data, but this would only be temporary as content authors could simply check out an aggregator and decide whether it is legitimate or not. Any other ideas? Leave them in the comments!