Plagiarism on the Web - Fun for Everyone?

I'm fucking furious. Twice in the past week, I've discovered that pieces that I have written - one on this blog and one for the Fall 2007 issue of Tango Magazine - have been plagiarized by other sites.

First of all, beauty and fashion bloggers, I urge you to visit this site, beauty.maxblog.eu, which appears to be aggregating content from US blogs and presenting it as it's own. I've reported it once for abuse (see link on bottom) and hopefully, if more of us do so, the blog will be removed from it's server.


UPDATE - The lovely and talented Elke Von Freudenberg of The Beauty Blog Network sent an intimidating e-mail that led to the removal of this site from it's network. Well done!

In addition, I was dismayed to see that a fellow blogger, The Beauty Counter, used a blurb (word for word!) on vinotherapy that I wrote for the Fall 2007 issue of Tango Magazine, which is on newsstands now.

As a working freelance journalist, I was saddened and angry at the lack of respect shown to my work and to intellectual property rights by both sites. Thankfully, The Beauty Counter has graciously added a note to credit Tango magazine as the source for this text.

Simply put, it's not ok to steal other people's work without appropriately crediting them. I hope that we ALL know better.

3 comments:

Lesha said...

Tango Magazine WAS given credit. Maybe one needs to read things thoroughly before jumping to conclusions. I'm suprised that you even cuss on your blog. That is on a very low mentality level and not VERY business like. Speaking of giving magazines credit, are you giving sites / magazines credit for the images you post on your blog or the site http://www.eye4s.com your name came from? Just wondering.

Sugarshock said...

I know how it feels - I've also been plagiarized by another blogger in the last while. For some reason, I get the sense that people think if it's stealing from web content (as opposed to print), it's not really stealing. But it IS STEALING folks!
I haven't contacted the offending bloggers, but perhaps I should....

eye4style said...

Hi Lesha,

If you look carefully at my site, YES, all of the original sources are credited, generally with a link back. If I'm talking about a designer or apparel, the link back will credit the site that originated the images.

And eye4s.com is certainly not where my name originated. That's obvious by the fact that I own the domain name eye4style.com and they are left with eye4s.com...My site has been around for about 1.5 years and at that point in time, it was the only "eye4style' on the web.

Best Regards,
Dina