PlagiarismToday

I’ve spent much of the past day catching up on protecting my own works and handling incidents of plagiarism involving them. I have handled, literally, dozens of cases in the last 24 hours and have many more to do. 

However, during all of this, I began to notice a new trend in online plagiarism, It seems that the preferred avenue for plagiarists is shifting once again. Instead of blogs or personal home pages, plagiarists are following the rest of the Web and moving more into social networking sites, the king of which is Myspace.

This presents new challenges for plagiarism fighters and opens up both new possibilities to plagiarize and new possibilities to fight back.

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Eric Newman of Blogburst left a comment on one of my most recent posts that got me thinking about about other ways in which Feedburner can help one protect their copyright.

Simply put, Feedburner, which already offers FeedFlare, a service that adds footer information to a feed, and Uncommon Uses, a service which tracks non-traditional uses of your feed, might have an other trick up its sleeve, this one unintentional.

Because, with Feedburner, what started out as one feed can quickly become two or more, adding a new level of flexibility to your RSS and changing the way one syndicates their content.

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Blind RSS scraping is obsolete.

That’s what I learned when I first started playing around with Feedburner’s new Uncommon Uses feature.

For while I wasn’t shocked to find that a splogger was making illegal use of my feed, I was definitely stunned to find out that this particular splogger wasn’t just blindly scraping my content, but rather, was intelligently scrapign only what served his use and tagging it both to organize it and make his scraped content more potent than ever.

It quickly became clear that we are entering a new age of splogging and content scraping, one where the sploggers themselves become a member of Web 2.0

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If you’re a blogger, it can be very difficult to know who is reading your feed. Fortunately for us, Feedburner stepped in and gave us all a simple way of finding out exactly how many people were reading your feed, how many of those people were clicking on items and which items they were following up on.

It’s an extremely useful service that’s well worth the pittance they charge for their premium service (their basic service was and still is free) and Feedburner is a site that I’ve been a paying customer of since the day I took Plagiarism Today live.

However, Feedburner is now using both its position as an RSS go between and feed tracking technology to help bloggers in a whole new way: By detecting and pointing out people that may be illegally reusing your feed.

Not only is this, potentially, a major blow against sploggers and scrapers of all varieties, but it could easily showcase a whole new side of RSS, something few have been willing to talk about though it’s likely been affecting almost everyone.

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Fan fiction is one of the most popular forms of writing on the Web. The combination of popular storylines, familiar characters and never ending hunger for more material (especially since many of these storylines have been abandoned by their original creators) makes it an easy form of writing to get into, both as an author and as a reader. Many new writers take up fan fiction before moving on to create stories of their own while other, more experienced, writers enjoy the tight-knit community and instant connection shared in their groups.

However, fan fiction is also a genre that can be very prone to plagiarism. As a recent incident on LiveJournal pointed out, articles of fan fiction can be very tempting targets for plagiarists and those looking for content to scrape. After all, such works are loaded with popular search phrases like “Star Trek” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but also offer the promise of near-instant readership, especially with so many popular and established fan fiction destinations on the Web.

Nonetheless, plagiarism of fan fiction remains one of the hardest forms to detect and to stop. It’s a form of plagiarism where the rules have been changed drastically and what was once cut and dry is no longer so simple.

In short, it’s an entirely different ballgame.

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One of the most difficult elements of stopping plagiarism is spotting it. Even with the power of Google Alerts, Copyscape and other plagiarism detection schemes, finding a plagiarized work in a prompt fashion can be very difficult. After all, Google can take weeks, if not months, to index a site and, in that time, stopping plagiarism can become a moot point, especially for timely articles.

If you run a medium to large site in your particular niche and plagiarism is a problem for you, consider tapping your readers for assistance. It never hurts to have additional eyes and ears out there looking out for you and, even though many will alert you to plagiarism no matter what, it’s very easy to encourage others and get more involvement in the issue.

And the more involvement you get, the more likely you are to stop plagiarism before it gets out of hand.

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As shocked as Steve Rubel was to find out that plagiarists were scraping his RSS feed, he was probably even more surprised to find out that his Creative Commons license actually allowed the abuse to take place.

Like many good Webmasters, Rubel licensed his work under a Creative Commons (CC) license in hopes of encouraging it’s sharing and distribution. He never considered that it might be used against him by RSS thieves seeking to sell ad space.

However, the CC license is rapidly becoming a double-edged sword as content becomes more valuable than ever and sites are looking for quick, easy ways to gain a lot of it.

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If I told you that I had a plagiarism solution that could prevent people from copying and pasting your works, be watermarked to certify ownership, stop RSS plagiarism, prevent sploggers from stealing your work and practically end scraping as we know it, you’d think the technique was a godsend.

That is, until I told you that the fix also slows down your site considerably, makes your text unsearchable and prevents large numbers of people from viewing your site.

Then you’d probably think twice about it.

However, that’s exactly the plagiarism-fighting nature of Hidetext.net, a free service that converts text, both small and large chunks of it, into simple images that can’t be copied and can’t be Googled.

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The other night I was pondering the problem of blog plagiarism and wondering what can be done about it. With RSS scraping becoming more popular, the continuing rise of splogs and the deluge of good old-fashioned copy and paste plagiarism taking place, blogs are rapidly becoming a haven for plagiarists of all varieties.

However, it can be difficult to tell the original posts from the copies. With the immediacy of the blogosphere and the ability to roll back timestamps on most entries, a plagiarized copy can appear to be posted at the same time or even before the original, especially if RSS plagiarism is involved.

Clearly, one of the first steps in defeating plagiarism in the blogging world is some kind of content verification system. Fortunately though, the tools we need for such a system are already in place. All that’s needed is for someone to take advantage of them…

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Plagiarists are more determined than ever to steal your content and get away with it. As the search engine wars have made content “king”, plagiarism has moved from an act of personal gratification and become a full-fledged business model. Much like how the virus/worm war escalated when spammers discovered their usefulness in sending out spam, the plagiarism war is entering a new, and frightening, territory as thieves discover its usefulness in gaining search engine ranking.

One of the critical tools in this new war is synonymizing software, which is software that takes a work and modifies it using synonyms of key words, producing a work that says practically the same thing but in a way that can’t be easily detected by search engines. This aids the plagiarist by greatly reducing the odds of their copyright infringement being discovered and prevents them from absorbing the “duplicate content” penalty some believe search engines apply.

For authors though, this can be a terrifying prospect as their hard work becomes the “seed” for tomes of search engine-friendly content that, though not making much sense, can work to bump the original from the searches and divert readers to derivatives that took only seconds to produce.

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