Yet another story on plagiarism - Friends turned plagiarists
Posted by multippt
I feel utterly disappointed that there are some who do copy from others… and profiteer from it. It’s even more disappointing if they are your friends. Well, looks like I have to live with that for now. Plagiarism is nothing new. Someone makes a identical sounding thing off you, and attempts to profit. But it is certainly something unfortunate if they happen to be your friends.
MSN can be a scary thing. Once you set off rumors, you’ll be assured that you’ll not benefit from it, despite getting the “pioneer advantage”. For example, I let off word of the PageRank update. Perhaps I said a lot more than I should. Then, within the next 5 minutes of telling someone about that rumor and my opinions on it, they began posting on their blogs - down to the complete details I’ve mentioned! That’s convenient.
In the dog-eat-dog world of news sites, having the pioneer advantage seems to help. Though, probably not anymore since once something is out, everyone begins copying from god-knows-where. Blogging is no different. If your friends happen to be bloggers as well, particularly ones dealing with news, rest be assured that if you post something on your site, you’ll have friends that will attempt to do the same, perhaps even adapting your entire story to theirs. This may be great news if they do attribute the source to you, but what if they didn’t? I guess it really hurts to give one link back.
This was probably not the only time which I had friends copying from me. It’s fine if they did rephrase part of the idea and add other stuff, but what if it contains practically 100% of the stuff that I say? Time and again history has repeated itself. It could be that I was ignorant and let it pass. Maybe it could be that because they are my friends, and I would not want to anger them. Almost 1 of every 5 posts on this site is adapted to at least one friend’s blog. The part that makes me feel disappointed is that they did it for the money. AdSense probably changed the world of blogging - to one that is more obsessed with money.
Maybe one day, I shall ask for attribution from my own fellow friends who “stole” my work.
