Great post Jonathan. My example is more like capitalizing on someone's enthusiasm. In college I wrote a great tagline for a fictional Mexican restaurant chain. It was so good, that I actually contacted one (in Dallas) with a nice introductory letter and a mild appeal to do some freelance copywriting work for them. This was a few years before email was the routine way to communicate (though websites were coming into their own), so the correspondence was via USPS mail. Anyway, a few weeks after sending my note, I received a response letter from the company thanking me for my letter, and explaining how they were already contracted with an agency of record and could not outsource any work to me. A few weeks after that, I decided to check out their site to see if I could figure out who their agency was. That's when I saw my tagline as their main splash page headline. I considered litigation, but was flat broke at the time and their letter was written in such a way that it didn't mention my contribution at all. Live and learn.
Anne
· 11 months ago
I've dealt with plagiarists before, however, working for a very large and well-known company, I am usually able to deter them with the threat of those lawyers as much of my work is cross-posted on my personal blog. It's nice to have that back-up!
Scott Stratten
· 11 months ago
Wow! Great stories Jonathan!
Reminds me of the time when a lady contacted the leaders of one of the About.com sites to say they had wrongly attributed an article to me, since she said it was written by her. When she was informed that, no, the article was in fact mine, she proceeded to tell them that I had copied her article and took credit for it.
Little did she know that the site admin was a friend of mine who requested to use the article from me years before she said she wrote it, but I also, like you, had the proof of it being online at that time.
I contacted her to explain that it's weird for the theif to accuse the victim of stealing, and she stuck to her story until I showed her the proof. It was then I figured out she had hired a ghost-writer off elance to write articles for her, and they simply yanked mine. No apology from her though, no admitting fault, she said it was a mis-communication...
oye!
Tonya
· 11 months ago
I've dealt with plagiarists but only in a situation where I was a moderator on a fiction site and had to step in on behalf of a third party. I think your blog is a very useful resource, as I often come across other writers with questions related to this worrisome issue. Will bookmark it to share the next time someone asks me. I'm sure at some point I'll be needing to refer to it as well, since some of my works are publicly posted on my site. Keep up the good work!
iFroggy
· 11 months ago
That second case is awful. :(
The third with the girlfriend and him having wrote the poem for her... lol. That's good. :)
Nice post.
Patrick
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
Oh, that's a good one. I suppose that belongs in the "Well, he'll never visit our Website" file. Probably really wasn't worth suing over but it is a real "facepalm" moment. I have to wonder if they seriously thought they would never get caught...
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
Plagiarists do have a nice tendency to fold under any kind of serious legal scrutiny. There are definitely advantages to being part of a large company with on-staff attorneys. Sounds like a good place to be to me!
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
The ghostwriter thing is always ugly. I've seen that on many occasions. If you go to an elance site, you get what you pay for usually I'm afraid. Still, the least she could have done is apologized for it and explained what had happened.
Of course, I've always found this idea of ghostwriting kind of strange in and of itself. I write something for someone and they get to take credit for it. Then, when someone copies it they can storm up to that person and call them a plagiarist.
I'm not wholly opposed to ghostwriting, but something sounds a little funny here...
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
Keep up the good work helping others with their cases and, if there is anything I can do to help you or anyone who approaches you, let me know!
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
I got over the second case a long time ago. It's over and the person got most of what they deserved. I'm at piece with it. The third though, is hilarious. I've got dozens more though, maybe a follow up post later.
Maria
· 11 months ago
As you know, plagiarism is an ongoing concern for me. I find that tracking down and fighting back against plagiarists is extremely time consuming and non-productive. But I feel a real NEED to fight back. I think there would be a lot of work for someone who does this professionally and had a legal team behind him/her to rattle the big swords. Sadly, unless such a person was affordable, people like me probably wouldn't be able to hire them. Sometimes, it just isn't worth the effort, no matter what your gut instinct tells you.
Thanks again for all you do here. Keep up the good fight.
cybele
· 11 months ago
Back in the early days of individuals posting my blog stuff on their own sites, they usually hotlinked the images.
So I'd swap out the images. Sometimes a roiling ball of maggots on an open wound with text that says "Only Maggots Steal" or a picture of The Golden Girls DVD Set with the text that said "When You Hotlink You're No Longer In Control." (But I stopped doing the latter because I realized I didn't have rights to the image but the maggots were public domain from the US gov.)
Now I block hotlinking so it's not so easy to do that.
I argue sometimes with photo stealers who insist that they took the pictures, but pointing them to my Flickr page for the photo with the full EXIF data usually shuts them up.
Anthony Lawrence
· 11 months ago
I've been using Numly for some proof of authoring. Costs me $60.00 a year, I think it's worth it.
One moron actually copied my post WITH THE NUMLY BARCODE. Duh - that was pretty dumb..
Laura Hale
· 11 months ago
I don't know if it falls into the category of stupid plagiarist or brilliant plagiarist as the author eventually used her plagiarized works in order to get a book deal... http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Cassandra_Claire... has most of the details. There were all sorts of excuses for the plagiarism when it was discovered, including that she was playing a game of spot the quote with her readers, that she had always footnoted the references (which she had never done that completely), that she had permission from the author (which she got before or after the plagiarism actually happened and depended on the telling) and that because it wasn't fan fiction, the plagiarism didn't count. The author in question was a journalist which explains that last defense. She was also supported by Internet (real life too) lawyer who specialized in entertainment law who said it wasn't plagiarism and threatened to sue people who implied that. (So it wasn't a surprise later when her lawyer was revealed to be a plagiarist. She defended herself as having done a pastiche.) The author then cribbed passages from her fan fiction verbatim into her professional works. So yeah, not sure if it is a case of stupid or brilliant because she helped use this all to help get herself that book deal.
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
That is, in many ways, the service I do attempt to provide, including the part where I work with attorneys to deal with cases that need a more serious tact. The problem is that going to attorneys is always expensive and there is no way to easily bring that down to a level that one would consider readily affordable to most people.
I do try to keep my rates extremely low so I can help more people, but there are things beyond my control. For this reason, I've also been looking at partnering with pro bono groups and others that might be able to help at a significantly reduced cost. I'll be posting more on this as I'm able to make it work.
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
The hotlinking issue is a tough one. Changing the image out can raise issues on its own, especially if you use something that might be "offensive" or "libelous". I've seen cases where such swap outs resulted in more hostility toward the victim than the plagiarist, as crazy as that sounds.
Blocking Hotlinking is probably a good idea.
Regarding the EXIF data, I'm always surprised how many would-be image infringers forget that such data exists and make claims easily disproved by their own metadata. Truly a "facepalm" moment.
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
That is pretty funny. It never ceases to amaze me stupid would-be plagiarists are. Glad to hear that you're enjoying Numly!
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
A plagiarist lawyer, that one is pretty good too. I suppose even plagiarists get to run with their own kind. Of course, in my experience, such "lawyers" turn out to be anything but. I've seen a lot of blowhards in my day but have had no big problems.
One has to be careful who they call a plagiarist, but there is no law against calling a spade a spade either.
Still, I agree it's hard to call this a case of a stupid plagiarist, she did seem to do quite well with it in the end...
What do people think about journalists stealing without referencing their sources?
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
I'm sorry to hear about your recent plagiarism problems, obviously I think nothing good about any plagiarism, whether it is ia journalist or another blogger.
I hope that you're able to find some resolution on these matters and that justice is done. If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know.
Will
· 11 months ago
I also have used Numly for a couple of years. I originally used the WordPress plugin, but I don't think that has been updated or supported for a long time. I was manually attaching the Numly generated information to my posts for a while, but find that I have not been doing it for the past few months. Just too cumbersome to remember to do for every post. I think I will be discontinuing using Numly. Too bad as it is a good service, just needs to be more easily incorporated into WordPress.
Jonathan - Do you still use Numly? I don't see it here.
Will
· 11 months ago
This has happened to me indirectly and to other bloggers I know. I have written about things that have later been taken up in daily newspapers and once even on radio. They are usually careful enough to not copy exactly so I question whether it is really plagiarism. Often newspapers will monitor blogs for content that seems like it deserves a wider audience. I am not sure there is anything worng with that. Sometimes I am even glad to see something picked up by the "mainstream" media from a blog and get wider publicity.
wombat
· 11 months ago
Well my little story is not about online plagiarism, however, might be of interest. Part of my work involves art direction, on two occassions during a job search several years ago i was told by the prospective employers that my work was not mine, as it turns out there had been more than one person showing my work and claiming it as theirs, in one case, getting them the job. Having to defend myself against accusations of plagiarism, when i was in fact the one plagiarised was mind numbing. Online is another matter altogether, unfortunately, what i have found is that the methods for plagiarism are becoming increasingly sophisitcated, i have lost track of the number of Wordpress plugins i have found that steal content and rewrite it. Its a sad state of affairs, and in the end for what, so that some people can make 20 dollars a month from running a hundred websites with stolen information. Not sure whther to laugh or cry. In any zase, i wish you all the best in your endeavours, and can only hope that methods may be implemented which prevent this type of thing from happening.
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
No, I don't. The reason being that the plugin causes problems with 2.7 and I had to remove it. Fortunately though, I JUST received word (yesterday actually) that a new author has taken up the plugin. I'll have more on that soon. My advice to you would be to hold tight for a week or two and see if anything comes of this. If it does, it could make Numly better than ever.
I'll keep everyone posted!
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
I'm sorry to hear about the first case. I have to wonder if you ever tracked down who it was that was doing that? However, I don't find it altogether surprising, I hear about such "portfolio" plagiarism pretty regularly. Fortunately, people who do it usually don't last long at the jobs they get, the reason being that they're frauds from the outset.
I agree that the online situation is pretty grim. We, content creators, are under attack from a lot of different sides including, as you put it, synonymized plagiarism, truncated plagiarism and other spam techniques. I've had a lot of luck in shutting down spam blog networks by attacking the revenue stream, but even my victories are but drops in a bucket.
It's going to take a coordinated push from multiple sides (ISPs, copyright holders, etc.) to make any real change.
wombat
· 11 months ago
Thanks for the commiserations, unfortunately whether they last at their jobs or not does not in any way compensate the damage they cause, and yes i did track down the culprits however i found myself still in the situation where i had to defend myself. Your expereinces with the female 'friend' and the 10 year old poet are all too common. Plagiarism such as what you mention by the likes of Coldplay has and always will be the norm. Such a sad state of affairs really.
It does console that you have been able to shut down spam blog networks, however i am afraid that a coordinated push is most likely impossible due to the fact that the ISPs are actually benefitting. It reminds me a great deal of the situation with music and movies, where the creators of the pieces are suffering, and i have often thought about this situation when i ran a record company. The problem is not limited to the actual file sharing programs or their users, it is in fact promoted by the purveyors of hardware, utilising as they do references to the possibiity of downloading copyrighted material as a selling point. Its irony of the highest order that maunfacturers such as Apple, after promoting their wares using these techniques have stepped in and created alternative download networks whereby they are benefiting from the situation directly, replacing the record companies and distribution networks with their newer model.
Bryan
· 11 months ago
Here's another dumbass plagiarist for your collection.
Some years ago, I was creative director for a sizeable Toronto agency, interviewing applicant writers. One guy was "particularly proud of" one ad series in his portfolio.
"So was I, when I wrote them", I said... and pointed to the framed copies on the office wall behind him.
He at least had the good grace to blush and leave quietly.
Jonathan Bailey
· 11 months ago
Ok, that is priceless. I have to admit, that one is good. As I see it, that is stupid on at least two different levels. First, he either didn't know who he was interviewing with or didn't know who actually wrote the ads in question (something you should probably look up when plagiarizing) and second he thought he could get away with plagiarism in the advertising world. I suppose it is possible, but in my experience advertisers usually know at least which company produced which ads, or can trivially look it up. It would have been easy to disprove even without him having the misfortune of running into the original author.
Thank you for the story and congrats on running at least one plagiarist out the door!
Franzeska
· 11 months ago
AFAIK, the lawyer really is one, and the plagiarized and/or poorly cited parts didn't make it into the published book. (There are plenty of fanfic bits in it, but they do seem to be her own work.) Plagiarism is certainly a huge problem on the internet, but so are personal vendettas like the one Laura has against the people mentioned there, other fan-run wikis, the Organization for Transformative Works (which I'm involved with), anyone internet famous who doesn't want to be friends with her, etc. Considering she's added blatantly false info about me to her wiki before, I'd take anything there with a grain of salt.
I love your blog though. I'll definitely be checking out your other posts.
--Franzi
MikeRT
· 8 months ago
The best retaliation I have ever seen was done when a critic of Radley Balko of The Agitator fame stole some of his content and linked the images back to theagitator.com. Balko changed the images to "Obama dildos."
All Comments
Reminds me of the time when a lady contacted the leaders of one of the About.com sites to say they had wrongly attributed an article to me, since she said it was written by her. When she was informed that, no, the article was in fact mine, she proceeded to tell them that I had copied her article and took credit for it.
Little did she know that the site admin was a friend of mine who requested to use the article from me years before she said she wrote it, but I also, like you, had the proof of it being online at that time.
I contacted her to explain that it's weird for the theif to accuse the victim of stealing, and she stuck to her story until I showed her the proof. It was then I figured out she had hired a ghost-writer off elance to write articles for her, and they simply yanked mine. No apology from her though, no admitting fault, she said it was a mis-communication...
oye!
I think your blog is a very useful resource, as I often come across other writers with questions related to this worrisome issue. Will bookmark it to share the next time someone asks me.
I'm sure at some point I'll be needing to refer to it as well, since some of my works are publicly posted on my site.
Keep up the good work!
The third with the girlfriend and him having wrote the poem for her... lol. That's good. :)
Nice post.
Patrick
Of course, I've always found this idea of ghostwriting kind of strange in and of itself. I write something for someone and they get to take credit for it. Then, when someone copies it they can storm up to that person and call them a plagiarist.
I'm not wholly opposed to ghostwriting, but something sounds a little funny here...
Thanks again for all you do here. Keep up the good fight.
So I'd swap out the images. Sometimes a roiling ball of maggots on an open wound with text that says "Only Maggots Steal" or a picture of The Golden Girls DVD Set with the text that said "When You Hotlink You're No Longer In Control." (But I stopped doing the latter because I realized I didn't have rights to the image but the maggots were public domain from the US gov.)
Now I block hotlinking so it's not so easy to do that.
I argue sometimes with photo stealers who insist that they took the pictures, but pointing them to my Flickr page for the photo with the full EXIF data usually shuts them up.
One moron actually copied my post WITH THE NUMLY BARCODE. Duh - that was pretty dumb..
I do try to keep my rates extremely low so I can help more people, but there are things beyond my control. For this reason, I've also been looking at partnering with pro bono groups and others that might be able to help at a significantly reduced cost. I'll be posting more on this as I'm able to make it work.
Blocking Hotlinking is probably a good idea.
Regarding the EXIF data, I'm always surprised how many would-be image infringers forget that such data exists and make claims easily disproved by their own metadata. Truly a "facepalm" moment.
One has to be careful who they call a plagiarist, but there is no law against calling a spade a spade either.
Still, I agree it's hard to call this a case of a stupid plagiarist, she did seem to do quite well with it in the end...
And here is a link to the debate and research we are conducting into this case and the wider issue of media plagiarising blogs: http://onlinejournalismresearch.ning.com/forum/...
What do people think about journalists stealing without referencing their sources?
I hope that you're able to find some resolution on these matters and that justice is done. If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know.
Jonathan - Do you still use Numly? I don't see it here.
I'll keep everyone posted!
I agree that the online situation is pretty grim. We, content creators, are under attack from a lot of different sides including, as you put it, synonymized plagiarism, truncated plagiarism and other spam techniques. I've had a lot of luck in shutting down spam blog networks by attacking the revenue stream, but even my victories are but drops in a bucket.
It's going to take a coordinated push from multiple sides (ISPs, copyright holders, etc.) to make any real change.
It does console that you have been able to shut down spam blog networks, however i am afraid that a coordinated push is most likely impossible due to the fact that the ISPs are actually benefitting. It reminds me a great deal of the situation with music and movies, where the creators of the pieces are suffering, and i have often thought about this situation when i ran a record company. The problem is not limited to the actual file sharing programs or their users, it is in fact promoted by the purveyors of hardware, utilising as they do references to the possibiity of downloading copyrighted material as a selling point. Its irony of the highest order that maunfacturers such as Apple, after promoting their wares using these techniques have stepped in and created alternative download networks whereby they are benefiting from the situation directly, replacing the record companies and distribution networks with their newer model.
Some years ago, I was creative director for a sizeable Toronto agency, interviewing applicant writers. One guy was "particularly proud of" one ad series in his portfolio.
"So was I, when I wrote them", I said... and pointed to the framed copies on the office wall behind him.
He at least had the good grace to blush and leave quietly.
Thank you for the story and congrats on running at least one plagiarist out the door!
I love your blog though. I'll definitely be checking out your other posts.
--Franzi