Plagiarism. Last month my local paper, The Boston Globe, had articles, editorials, and
letters to the editor about plagiarism nearly every single day.
They’ve had plenty of fodder. First, there was the ongoing
saga of Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life who admitted to
borrowing passages
from another book. Then there was Raytheon’s chief William Swanson who cribbed
from a textbook when he wrote his “Swanson's Unwritten Rules of
Management.” We also heard about DaVinci
Code author Dan Brown’s copyright
infringement suit and how the Internet is uncovering rampant
plagiarism in China’s
academic circles.
So what does this have to do with Guerrilla Consulting? Fans
of the book know that publishing your bylined articles is one of the ways a
guerrilla consultant stands out from the crowd. But those very same articles
that showcase your expertise are susceptible to being copied by competitors.
The flip side of the Web’s ability to disseminate your
content to potential clients is that it makes it ridiculously easy to steal.
Articles, blog posts, even entire Web sites – I’ve seen examples of all types
of content that was stolen.
I had a couple of experiences with this lately. First, while
doing a Google search, I discovered a link for an article title that sounded
similar to one I wrote and had published in Management
Consulting News a few years ago. I clicked on the link, and started reading
an article that borrowed quite heavily from mine. The concept, many subheads,
and even the content of the sidebar were the same. Although the author expanded
the article with her own content, it was obvious that she used mine for her
base and didn’t change it enough.
Ironically, the writer has excellent credentials and an impressive
client list. To give her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she read my article,
internalized it, and didn’t realize she was plagiarizing. For what it’s worth,
that’s the same excuse Kaavya Viswanathan gave. Regardless, I asked her to
remove the article, and it’s now gone from her Web site.
The second recent experience came with a client’s article.
Actually, this article also appeared in Management
Consulting News. In this case I didn’t find a competitor copying her
article, but I found it listed on two sites that supply students with essays to
plagiarize. For only $9.99 I could have searched their entire database and copied
the full text of her article and about a zillion others.
Although not technically plagiarized, another one of my
client’s published articles regularly show up word-for-word on a foreign IT blog.
They provide his name, but no links to his site, no bio, and no mention of where
the material originally appeared.
Curious if some of your content is being used elsewhere? Put
a phrase in quotes and Google it. You might be surprised.
-Andrea Harris-
I had an accountant/bookkeeper in another state copy almost my entire, 200pp web site and reuse it as his own.
In a way, it was funny. E.g., I offer to give away copies of my book QuickBooks for Dummies to new clients. And he was making the same offer. But it still ticked me off...
When I contacted him, he was initially apologetic, then ugly...
This is all off-topic, however. What I wanted to do was share a handful of things I think you can usually do:
1. Have an attorney write a cease and desist letter. (This will scare them at the very least--and may get the offender to remove content.)
2. Contact Google at their Digital Millenium Copyright Act web and ask them to remove the plagarist's pages from their index. (You need to tell them which search arguments lead to the plagarist's web pages with the copied content.)
3. Not to go off the deep end, but you can also do a little checking on the plagarist. Probably if they're stealing content from you, they're doing other crummy stuff. The guy who stole my website said he was a public accountant... but didn't quite seem straight. So I checked, found he wasn't, and then contacted his state's board of accountancy so they would discipline him. (They sounded like they knew of this guy and weren't surprised when I gave them his name.)
Just some thoughts...
P.S. You can use the www.copyscape.com web site to see who's plagarized your site.
Posted by: LLC Formations CPA | May 29, 2006 at 04:08 PM
The Internet provides so much opportunity for disseminating your message, publishing value-add content, but as much as it gives it can take away too, through plagiarism.
Recently I had someone email me pointing me to their website where they had very clearly re-used content from my blog. Some of it was attributed (but poorly) and I was rather surprised. He plagiarized *and* told me about it. I've asked him to remove it, or put a more obvious/proper credit, neither of which has been done. I'm not even sure what the next step is, but the whole incident is bizarre.
Posted by: Ben | May 22, 2006 at 09:37 AM