2008-02-19

Plagiarism, Revisited

Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.

Raymond Chen posted about a topic yesterday that seems to hit the nail on the head with regard to some of the recent posts I've made here. In What's with all those spam ping-bots?, he describes the methodology used by blog and comment spammers / content thieves, and the motivation ($$) for doing what they do.

Of interest:

(You may notice that many of these sites mis-attribute the authorship; some of them even claim to have written the article themselves!)

Raymond also offers some advice about what one can try to do to "hit them in the pocketbook".

Sadly (ironically?), as I write this, 50% of the comments to that very blog entry are of the type that Raymond was writing about.

So it appears that there is not much that one is going to do to curb this. Also, considering that much of the content here (not just the newer stuff) has already been picked up and assimilated into other sites that slap a label on it as their own, and have even translated it (?????) into foreign languages, and then stamped ads all over it, I'm not inclined to waste much effort on the matter. I'll simply preface each entry with what you have seen the last few articles start with, and hope that that part of it makes its way along with the article to wherever it winds up. I may intersperse one or two similar statements in the longer articles as well. I hope it's not too distracting...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that he turned off whatever bot filter he has for that post in order to illustrate his point.

said...

Or maybe those were not really spam, but readers having some silly fun.

What about a CAPTCHA like the one below? That’s a decent first line of defence.