I want to talk about a blogular phenomenon that has been irritating me no end for… I can’t even remember how long. This phenomenon is plagiarism. Now, plagiarism comes in a lot of forms. A pretty common one is just plain old incorporating other people’s ideas into one’s work without credit. Today, though, I particularly want to talk about out and out stealing of full posts.
Sometimes, I find posts from feminist blogosphere writers have been copied and pasted onto other blogs or onto Facebook pages or some such. If a post is mine, I tend to contact the person responsible and request that they remove my post and replace it with a fair use excerpt and link (see below). If a post is another writer’s, I tend to contact that writer and let hir handle it hirself. That’s because copying and pasting blog posts or web pages without permission is stealing, just as surely as copying out bits from textbooks and putting them in a school essay without proper acknowledgement is cheating. The Internet is not copyright-free. Just because there is a copying and pasting function available to you, it does not give you the right to take other people’s hard work and appropriate it without permission. This is true whether you include a link back to your source; this is true whether you cite the name of the author. It is never okay.
Stealing doesn’t always take the form of copying and pasting, though. There are a number of aggregator sites, some particularly focussing on social justice work, that use feedreader systems like Google Reader in order to scrape blog posts and place them on their own sites without permission. I’ll just note that this is not true of all aggregator sites. For example, feministblogs.org has Feministe’s permission to use our blog feed on their site. But aggregators using feeds without permission is a big problem, and one that I don’t see going away.
Stealing posts in these ways is not a victimless crime. When you take a post from someone, you are stealing pageviews, a significant form of Internet capital. If you’d linked instead, you would be fairly passing on pageviews, and perhaps encouraging pageviews to your website in return. Where a site has advertising, this stealing of pageviews also means stealing advertising money. Advertising money is what keeps a lot of the blogs you love functioning at all. Moreover, stealing the work of writers means stealing professional reputations, stealing livelihoods. That is not on at all.
I’m particularly disgusted to see stealing of social justice pieces by people who are supposedly doing social justice. There is nothing about stealing people’s work that resembles social justice. Sometimes writing a blog is the primary bit of social justice a person can do. Sometimes someone has poured their heart and soul into a post. In any case, people deserve justice, and that includes respectful treatment of their writing.
So, how do you make sure you’re not plagiarising? Sometimes a simple reflection on what you’ve been reading recently or on the topic can help. In the course of writing this post, I thought about whether I had might have taken any ideas in it from anywhere else. I realised that the paragraph two above this one, on the effects of content stealing in terms of advertising and page views, reminded me of a post I’d read several months ago by past Feministe guest blogger s.e. smith called Don’t Infringe On Me. Now, if I’d left that unacknowledged, I would have been plagiarising. Perhaps, instead of writing this post of my own, I might have copied and pasted s.e.’s post without permission. That would have also been plagiarism, even if I had also included s.e.’s byline and a link back to ou blog.
What’s fair use, then? How can you acknowledge a great bit of writing without stealing from the author(s)? Well, here’s how! You can write out the name of the author, copy and paste a few sentences at the most (which you put in quotation marks, indent or put in a blockquote), and link back to your source with a clearly marked hyperlink. That way, you get to reference a piece of writing, your source gets pages views and such, and you’ve done the ethical thing. Or you could even ask the author’s permission to reprint. How excellent for us all!
I’m going to be amused to see if this post ends up on any content scraper sites.