Online plagiarism strikes blog world

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By Maura Welch, Globe Correspondent | May 8, 2006

Beth gets more than 500 hits per day at her blog, Cursed to First, which serves as a very personal homage to the Red Sox and the Patriots, so she knew that spicy entries like ''Chicks dig the long ball" were being read. She didn't realize until recently that they were also being ripped off.

Last month, an alert reader informed Beth that her blog was being plagiarized. Dozens of Beth's blog entries had been stolen, word-for-word, over six months. Names of people in her life were changed to the names of people whom the plagiarist apparently knew, creating the impression that she had lived Beth's experiences and had thought her thoughts.

''What's the point of having a blog if you can't even write your own original content for it?" Beth -- who like many bloggers requested that her full name not be used in order to keep her blogging and professional lives separate -- wrote in a post about the theft.

Jonathan Bailey, the author of Plagiarism Today, a blog dedicated to the issue of plagiarism online, said this type of cut-and-paste plagiarism is widespread. At any given moment, Bailey said, he's helping up to 25 bloggers who have been plagiarized -- people like Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, whose Latino blog has been regularly plagiarized. There's even a sex blogger who found that entries were being pilfered.

While plagiarism has been around forever, it's now as easy as a click. And since anyone can publish for free, plagiarism has reached a whole new level of dastardliness.

Steve Rubel, a senior vice president at Edelman, the public relations powerhouse, writes a widely read blog called Micro Persuasion. ''Today there is just more content to steal," he said. ''People take content from my blog all the time."

Anna from London logged on April 18 to find, through the referrer logs for her blog Little Red Boat, that a post in which she idly mused about what to do on a holiday weekend had been plagiarized by a blogger. Anna immediately did a screen grab of the stolen content and published it in a post called ''Tuesday morning. It's the new Monday morning."

''If people are going to nick your content, then why not do it logically and nick a well-crafted classic piece of writing rather than a bored musing?" Anna blogged.

Most of Anna's posts bring from nine to 30 comments, but this one quickly drew 66. In the ensuing discussion with her regular readers, Anna noted, ''Someone else did this once, copy and pasting my life and changing the names. The same thing's happened on Flickr in the last week -- someone's downloaded a couple of my photos and reuploaded them as their own -- but, and it's very similar: They're Not Even Some of My Best Photos. They are, in fact, BAD photos. WHY?"

Michael Zimmer, a doctoral candidate and blogger at New York University, said that ''social network" sites like MySpace, which measure popularity by the number of page views or friends within a social network, may unintentionally contribute to the problem.

''The desire to fabricate content to attract people's attention is a possible result," Zimmer said, ''like a 6-year-old who exaggerates about something on the playground to impress and gain friends."

Furthermore, the relative anonymity of blogs ''may create both protection from being found out, as well as a form of escapism from their actual life experiences."

With more than 38 million blogs, it's difficult to determine exactly how widespread blog plagiarism has become.

''A-list bloggers don't see much copy-and-paste plagiarism because their popularity insulates them," said Plagiarism Today's Bailey. ''Unknown bloggers aren't plagiarized much because they're undiscovered, and if they are read their content is usually too personal to be used elsewhere."

So who gets ripped off the most?

''It's the midrange bloggers, like me and Beth," Bailey said. ''We're talented enough and have enough of a base to be known within a circle, but unknown enough to not be recognizable immediately by your average visitor."

Rubel, whose blog is read by about 10,000 people a day, which qualifies him as an A-lister, said that as far as he knows, no one has tried to pass themselves off as him. But ''it's an insidious problem overall," no matter how many readers you have, he said.

Plagiarism Today offers advice for bloggers hoping to protect themselves. Plagiarism can be reduced simply by putting a clear, concise, copyright notice on the blog, letting readers know the work is protected by copyright. Also, bloggers might consider shortening their RSS feeds so that they're allowing only a summary to be broadcast.

Free tools like Copyscape can help find word-for-word copies of content on the Web.

But there is also the great saving grace of the Web itself.

''The blogosphere is a tremendous fact-checking machine," Rubel said. ''It does a great job rooting things out."