Blog Plagiarism and Scraping of Content
According to Dictionary.com, plagiarism is “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.” The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines THEFT as: the act of stealing; specifically: the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
“Scraping” refers to copying off another site that’s not personally owned by the party doing the scraping. Not referencing information sources and claiming that information as your own is plagiarism and content scraping. Spammer and ad-only blogs are chalked with scraped content stolen from other sites.
Plagiarism in the blogosphere is an extremely frustrating problem that is rabid on the web. In truth, anyone can steal your content and publish it on their site. After scrubbing it here and there, it now becomes “theirs.” It is extremely disheartening to see your hard work, laborious topic research and precious time cheaply ripped off.
This is precisely why I love Copyscape so much. It’s an indispensable blogging tool that uncovers plagiarism of your content. It’s also a free service. You simply type in the URL of your original page of content and Copyscape will pull up and expose any content that matches yours. It could be a sentence, a phrase, a snip-it or even an entire page of your content.
Copyscape also has a service called Copysentry that searches the web for any copiers of your content and then emails you if any is detected. As a deterrent, you can also display plagiarism warning banners from Copyscape on your site.
If you discover that your original content is now sitting on someone else’s website, time is of the essence. See the Guide to Responding To Plagiarism for the best actions to take to get your content removed as quickly as possible.
Plagiarism/scraping is a dirty problem that most professional bloggers are unfortunately, very aware of. Plagiarism Today is a blog entirely dedicated to the subject of plagiarism, packed with insightful articles and informative tips.
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I agree that copysentry is great service to have . I put in on the homepage of all my sites and I get a weekly email.
Thanks for the post. Yes Copyscape is a beautiful website with lots of best services out of which Copysentry is one. Is there any law for taking some legal action on those who copy the website content?
I personally use the copygator website to find duplicated content. To me it has a number of benefits over copyscape and copyrightspot:
1. it’s automated and brings me results instead of me searching for duplicated content. All i had to do was submit my feed and it started monitoring my feed showing me who’s republished my articles on the web.
2. i get notified by email so it contacts me when it finds copies of my articles online.
3. i use their image badge feature to alert me directly on my website when my content is being lifted.
4. it’s a free service as opposed the “per page” cost of copyscape/copysentry.