Defining Plagiarism What exactly is plagiarism? In essence, plagiarized material is stolen material. Something is plagiarized when proper attribution (credit) is not given for words, concepts, theories, etc. By all accounts, plagiarism is a scourge throughout the Internet world. In part this is due to the fact that all types of material is available almost instantaneously by doing even the simplest type of web search. It is very easy for freelance writers and other persons to scrape and reuse this content. In fact, a great deal of the material available today on the Internet is simply information that has been recycled over and over again.
The Loss of Intellectual Property? Closely related to plagiarism is the concept of intellectual property. Basically a capitalistic idea, the concept of intellectual property envisions that the original creator has a right of ownership over that which they have created. Not all societies have endorsed this idea; however it is the dominant concept in Western societies, and especially in the realm of law. In layman’s terms, plagiarism is wrong because it inevitably results in the loss of intellectual property. When proper attribution is not given, the rightful “owner” or “originator” is not given acknowledgment of their work and efforts.
The Two Forms of Plagiarism For our purposes, we understand that there are two similar, but different, forms of plagiarism. One type of plagiarism is the stealing of your website content. This occurs, of course, when someone visits your site and “borrows” its contents without permission. This form of plagiarism can take various forms, including the outright stealing of verbal content (words), the use of images, charts and diagrams, or illustrations and artwork, or even the referencing of certain unique concepts and ideas that may be discussed on your site.
The other form of plagiarism that often occurs online is when you steal another sites content. When might that happen? Assuming that you would never do such a thing directly for yourself, this might occur when you employ of others to prepare Web pages, articles and other types of online content (i.e., blog postings, photos, etc.). Far too many site owners have “assumed” that the articles, site pages and other information prepared for use on their site represent the writer’s / developer’s work and no one elses’.
Some Suggested Solutions Of course, the real need here is to prevent the loss of your own, or someone else’s, online content. How can we begin to attack and beat back the scourge of plagiarism of online content?
1. One very useful tool is the copyscape website. Functioning in a way similar to a search engine, the use of copyscape will allow you to check your own sites content. You can have this excellent service continually monitor the content of individual web pages, or even an entire site — and they will notify you if content on your site is detected on any other Internet webpage.
Many people are not aware, however, that for a small charge you can take content that has been prepared for you by freelance writers, web designers and others and submit it to the copyscape service. Doing this will help to ensure that you will not be inadvertently contributing to the problem of online plagiarism by posting material that actually belongs to others.
2. Another useful tool is Google alerts. These are also set up similar to a web search — through the use of a Google alert you can harness the power of this extremely powerful search engine. You can set up a Google alert to be run on a weekly basis on any type of text snippet you desire For example, you can set up a Google alert on your business name, personal name, brand names, or other unique identifiers. Google sends you an e-mail with the results, including webpage URLs where the plagiarized content may be located.
According to some sources, one of the greatest problems on the Internet today is the proliferation of plagiarized content. Let’s all do our part: let’s keep an eye on our own content (going after the content thieves where necessary), and also make sure that content that is prepared for us has not been stolen by freelance content providers looking to make a quick buck.
