Beware of Cyber Thieves

By Mary Anne Donovan

I had a harrowing experience last night. I was perusing the web for an article I'd written recently on search engine optimization to see how many pick-ups it had gotten. Unlike previous article checks, this time I used the article title, "The Rhetoric of SEO" instead of my name as author for the Google search. Well, guess what? As I happily examined the pickups, most of which gave proper credit to me as author as well as links to our site, I came upon one forum entry that used the exact title of my article, and verbatim text of a portion of it. And, here's the clincher, it was posted by a forum administrator who gave no hint of author credit or suggestion that it had been written by anyone but him or her.

Well, I came a little unglued, to say the least, promptly joined the forum so I could make a post as well as communicate with this low-life thief, and subsequently left both an email and a forum post. I did not receive a response, but within several hours of these communiqués, both my post and my plagiarized work were removed from the forum.

This is a major wow. Unfortunately, the Internet is rife with plagiarism, but to see administrators of our trusted professional sites engaging in it is quite astonishing. (I will not name this site but it was a forum on a website for a company that provides "reliable web hosting," domain name registration and domain transfer services.)

However, there is a ground swell of anti-plagiarists out there, as embodied in Plagiarism.org, (http://www.plagiarism.org/), and there are several anti-plagiarism software products out there including Turnitin (http://www.turnitin.com/static/home.html), and ithenticate (http://www.ithenticate.com/static/home.html).

Okay, we have several morals to this story. First, if you are a website owner or webmaster, and looking to populate your site with good, quality content, give proper credit to the authors of the work if it is in the content "free zone," or ask permission of the author if it is not.

Second, if you are a contributor to forums, listservs, newsgroups, etc., never, never, never present anyone else's words as your own.

And third, if you are an author, make it a habit to peruse the web at least once a week to see where your work has been picked up. Do a search both on your name, and then on the article title. If it has been used without permission or proper credit, then take immediate action by first contacting the plagiarizer, and then the administrators of the site.