Plagiarism - We've All Been There

It's a bright sunshiny day in the freelance world. You've come a long way since you started out, and you're taking a moment to reflect on how well your freelancing career is working for you!

Then you open your email. A friend's puzzled query - "Hey, didn't YOU write this?" - and a link to a blog or website you've never heard of.

There it is. It might be something you just published yourself, or something you wrote over a year ago, but it's definitely yours - except now it's posted under someone else's byline.

The first reaction is generally shock, quickly followed by anger. How dare they! You poured your heart into that piece - OK, maybe you whacked it out in 20 minutes one night because it was hot on Google Trends and you figured the revenue share would be good - doesn't matter. It's YOURS, not theirs, and they had NO RIGHT.

This blog is designed to help those of us who hate plagiarism to fight it effectively and responsibly.

In some cases, there is true ignorance: someone has been told by a 'guru' to scrape content to populate an RSS feed, or there is ignorance of the law. Often a quick note to the offending party results in the prompt removal of your content with an abject apology.

Sometimes you can even work out a deal and allow the offender to make things right by removing the main body of text and replacing it with a snippet and link that leads to your own work. Alternately, you can set a fixed price for reuse of your work provided a byline is added - this can be a flat fee for one time use, or a per month arrangement.

In other scenarios, the plagiarizers know exactly what they are doing. This is when you bring out the heavy artillery - comment, send letters, report them to Google and their web host, and try to get their website or blog shut down.

My personal peeve is people who promote themselves as freelancers and steal other writers' work. I saw this happen just this morning - an article was blatantly scraped and posted on Strollerderby (a parenting blog at Babble.com)by one Paula Bernstein, who styles herself as 'freelance journalist'.

The original article was written by a good friend of mine, who instantly sent a letter to the site. Lo and behold - the article was quickly rewritten. That's not the point, however - Paula should have been kicked off Babble and banned from posting.

She knew better. She knew better, and she did it anyway. Shame!

Paula Bernstein is now on my watch list; and through this blog, on yours. I freely invite anyone who is being plagiarized to send me a message - I'll investigate, and if the plagiarism exists, I'll post the name of the plagiarist here for all to see.

Note that this only applies to your own work; since many people use pen names, reporting plagiarism of someone else's work is impractical. If you see plagiarism of someone else's work, notify them directly - and give them the link to this blog.

Let's start outing plagiarists. It's not libel or slander if it's true. Take screen-shots and forward them to me with your reports - a picture is worth a thousand words! It's time for plagiarism to STOP.