Copyright, Plagiarism and Acknowledgement of Authorship

When you post material on a free content website you do so knowing that others will publish your work for no fee.  This is, of course, fine and as it should be.  The question is when they do so by breaking the original terms and post the work as their own should you take offence, legal action or what?

Please compare:  http://literatureonsite.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-science-fiction-writing-necessarily.html

With my original:  http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Science-Fiction-Writing-Necessarily-Not-Serious-Literature?&id=3753554

(Yes, I have taken screenshots in case the “author” decides to “edit” his “work” at a later date.)

The differences between the two articles at time of posting are very few.  The owner of the website appears to think that by altering a few words here and there it will become an original article.  Maybe he also thought that by performing such small alterations the plagiarism would escape detection.

The site that has posted this appears to be merely a “scraper” type site for the purposes of hosting Google Adsense adverts.  I say this because the site seems to have little original content, but merely endless cut and pasted articles taken from elsewhere.  This would appear to be an Adsense violation also.

When I discovered the site earlier today I admit I was annoyed.  If the author would actually acknowledge where the article came from (backlink) I couldn’t care less where it is listed, providing he would also list it unaltered.  Indeed the link to the original author and publishing the work unaltered is the agreement under which the site he downloaded it from operates.

The guy who listed this clearly cannot speak English.  It is because of the atrocities committed by Google translate that I finally had to laugh.

Take this as an example:

‘When science-fiction writing effective form of this connection with the reader, then, how can it as “poor literature will be judged”?’

Sorry, what did you say?

I assume because of the apparent inability to speak English that he is poor and is performing his acts of piracy to earn some money.  I don’t begrudge his efforts to make money from writing, as since my hospitalisation, I am unable to work at present and in a similar situation.  What annoys me is the lack of acknowledgement of the original source and the mutilation of my work in order to try and escape plagiarism filters.

The article was already listed for free.  What more did he want?

Dave Felton.

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