Plagiarism – My First Experience

by venukb on May 24, 2007

Few months back I had written a post of describing the features of Airtel Data Card. It turned out to be a hugely popular post(with 143 comments); everyday the site gets a lot of unique visitors to this post.

Most of the visitors are referred either by Google or Yahoo Search (The former almost bringing in 90% of the visitors). I was wondering why Live Search was not referring to this post.

A search for “Airtel Data Card” on Live Search took me to this post on TechTime

http://techtime.co.in/thetech/data-card-from-airtel.html

Compare the contents of the above post with the one I wrote. The author has done a copy of my post (including the formatting of the text) and published as his own content. The only thing he has spared are the images embedded in the post.

I wrote a comment requesting the author of the TechTime blog to delete the post. My comment was conveniently deleted.

I had a look at the other posts in the site site and it looks like the TechTime blog is filled with Plagiarized posts. The blog which describes itself as “Just another Indian Tech weblog” should be renamed to “Just another Shit log” !!

How do you deal with this kind of content theft ?

What other things can one do other than politely asking the author to delete/remove the copied content?

Update

Whois.sc just gave me some more personal information about this TechTime Guy

Registrant Email:
Admin ID:PA1468_178
Admin Name:imran baig
Admin Organization:imran baig
Admin Street1:456 5th cross 2nd main
Admin Street2:kalyan nagar
Admin City:bangalore
Admin State/Province:Karnataka
Admin Postal Code:560046
Admin Country:IN
Admin Phone:+91.91988606808
Admin FAX:+91.91988606808

Guess I have to call him on his mobile :D

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

Keith Dsouza May 25, 2007 at 5:13 am

Hi Venu,

Too bad to hear, there are many such hidden blogs which blatantly rob content and republish it without even mentioning the source.

It was the worst case he just copied your entire article, and your employer became his employer too lol.

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Harish May 25, 2007 at 8:23 am

That was some lovely use of ctrl-c, ctrl-v. Let us know how ur conversation with him went :D

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Apurv May 25, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Hilarious.. found it amusing actually.. Sorry venu.. but can’t stop laughing.. :D :D :D

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venukb May 25, 2007 at 10:43 pm

Apurv,
Harish did a check on this other posts and if you paste the starting line of most of his posts, you would find the original post it seems :)

By the way the blog admin, did visit this post and looks like he took serious note of it.
plagiarism

Now the Blog post is updated with some new content !!! Go Read it :D

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TheAnand May 25, 2007 at 10:49 pm

Thats too bad…..maybe you should contact his host and ask for the removal of the domain from them for plaguraism, you can also go in to sue this guy, since copyright is defined to everything the moment it is created….you created the content, you own the copyright…sue this guy for a million dollars …..you winning is pretty much obvious…if he is using adsense, tell them that he is using copyrighted content which is illegal…get him banned from there….put up a post in major forums informing them about this blog….

good luck having your revenge…i absolutely hate these kind of people…And if you ask me, I will have some of my lawyer friends involved…

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TheAnand May 25, 2007 at 10:59 pm

And by the way most of his content are copied…i just did a search on copyscape……

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venukb May 25, 2007 at 11:10 pm

Anand, the guy seems to have taken serious note and has changed the post. So I guess we can keep lawyers away from him for the time being :) .

By the way he does need to stop copying content from other blogs !! and change all the other copied posts.

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TheAnand May 25, 2007 at 11:19 pm

I think he needs to learn about the pain of creating content the hard way…I say you take a copy from the google cache and get your lawyer friends to work on it. I think you have only discovered the tip of the ice berg, if you can find a way to chk for this type of plagiarism then you will find that most of your popular posts will somewhere there on the internet.

And thinking about suing this guy, you can do it. Claim some copyright violation and claim damage…this way you make money blogging!!! aha! :-) forget adsense and TLAs! ! ! Create quality content, watch out for others copying it, sue them and there you go, the perfect formula for making money blogging! :-D

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Benjamin Cass June 27, 2007 at 11:24 am

So what did you end up doing about this? Did you go to the guys house a egg it?

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Venu June 27, 2007 at 8:59 pm

Benjamin, the guys saved my trip to his home by changing the post :)

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RJ November 24, 2007 at 10:26 pm

I have had the same experience just this week with my post on the phone service Flashphone: Make Free Calls to select countries from our PC.
The comment under that post is a trackback from the blog that ‘used’ my content and the slideshow I created.

A gentle comment requesting atleast a credit for the slideshow did work and the blogger responded, I must add in his favour. very quickly.

Like an earlier commentator indicated….there will be many more such blogs which use plagiarised content just to get adsense-related exposure. One of the ‘nature of the beast’ called the blogsphere.

Good job on your plagiarist!

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Arif November 29, 2007 at 3:17 am

Plagriarists are total B@$TrD$. Devoted Ppl sit around for hours making insightful content painfully, while on the other hand, these guys come around and “well this looks nice…my next blog post”. Copy. Paste. No credit. Nothing.

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venukb November 30, 2007 at 9:09 pm

rj/Arif, yup agreed, plagriarists are PITA’s. Some might reply back to your mail, some might not and most of them I have seen close in a few weeks.

Best thing to do is to contact the web hosting and report the issue and they generally take care of the problem :)

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