Little point to blog plagiarism
October 23rd 2010 03:54
Plagiarism has been around pretty much since the first cave painting. One cave man dipped his finger into the blood of a slain gazelle and painted the outline of a running gazelle on the cave wall.
All the girls gathered around and admired the innovation and originality of the idea, which so miffed another of the men that he dipped his finger into the blood and made a second drawing on the wall of the cave.
It wasn't really a second painting. The second man, having neither the imagination nor the talent of the first, simply copied the original drawing. A second gazelle, and the first instance of plagiarism.
Our cave man plagiarist got no more profit from his copied work - the girls just laughed at him and went back to cooing over the first guy, by now at work on a mammoth - than do bloggers who copy the work of others.
Blogs are a far freer canvas for plagiarists than a cave wall or any other medium used since to portray the thoughts, art, writing and music of mankind. Basically, anyone can start a blog on any subject, Google up some information, and fill their blog with high-quality content.
And many people, especially, newcomers to the medium, do just that.
They will find that no-one - not the girls, not the uninformed masses eager for clear and elegantly presented knowledge, and certainly not other aficionados of their subject - will come to their blog in big numbers.
Of course there will be some visitors, but no matter how much carefully selected, copied content is put there, the blog readership will never grow large.
There are two reasons for this.
First, Google has an inbuilt plagiarism sensor. In that 0.03 of a second or whatever it takes Google to complete a search on your key words, it not only prioritises the results for you in terms of quantity (number of web site pages, number of blog posts) and popularity (viewer numbers) of content, it recognises duplication as it searches, and promotes the original. Google polices this effectively, proudly promoting the original work (which it recognises by the simple expediency of publication date), and relegating imitations to the search result back pages.
The speed and efficiency of a Google search is also relevant to the second point, which is that it is easy to check the originality of any blog content. Simply copy two or three sentences into a Google search window and hit Search - if that material exists anywhere else on the internet, Google will find it instantly.
And that means that big bloggers, companies, advertising and public relations agencies - anybody out there producing a large quantity of original content - can set up automated searches to find incidents of plagiarism.
When they find copied material, they mostly ignore it. This is because, as already explained, plagiarists will reap little reward.
Armed with the weapon that is Google, original content providers can of course also take action if deemed necessary. They can warn, and sue if the warnings go unheeded, anyone trying to make money from copied work. A serial plagiarist blatantly passing content off as his or her own work can be watched. At some point, enough will be enough, and a warning will be issued.
Most of the time, however, it's not worth bothering about. Most plagiarists pose little threat, and will eventually shrivel and die.
image: cambridgetshirts.com
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