The other day I was reviewing some of the tutorials I’ve written over the past few years and found something disturbing. For some reason I decided to copy the introduction paragraph into Google to see what appears. I expected to see my site and maybe some tutorial link listing sites, but I found something more…

I followed the link to some tech forum and found my tutorial posted there in its entirety, without any mention of the source. I was a little shocked by the blatant plagiarism of content, so I registered and posted my displeasure in a reply. Curiosity then had me searching my other tutorials to see what else may have been ripped off.

I found that this same site had copied several other tutorials without giving credit. So I replied to each one with an increasingly harsh tone. In that process I also found some other sites that had done the same thing, but I didn’t feel like going through the trouble of pursuing each one.

After a little bit, I received a message from the site owner (who was the poster of most of the offending posts):

“Hi

[redacted] is a 100% non-profit (non-advertising) organisation formed to help the engineering community. Hosting for the site and every other expense is covered within our team. We do not earn monet form the site in any mean.

However, I apologise for the misbehaviour. We might have missed the copyright status of your articles. Forgive us for that. Link to your site is added at the end of every page that was copied.

I would like to welcome you to work with [redacted] to share knowledge beyond borders, limits, etc….

Best Regards,

[redacted]“

That last part is funny. The rest is just bullshit. It doesn’t matter if you make money, you don’t just copy someone’s work without attribution or permission. I thought this was just common knowledge or at least common decency, but I guess I was wrong…

Sharing knowledge is great, and there’s nothing getting in the way of doing that without committing plagiarism. I think the standard excepted method is to post a short excerpt along with a link to the source. Remember those tutorial listing sites I mentioned? That’s exactly what they do.

Anyway, I write tutorials primarily to share knowledge. I also do it to gain exposure, which of course requires that people know that I was the one who wrote it. The positive side of this is that someone found value in my writing, so I must be doing something right. I just think that people should respect the author when they find something useful.

Filed under: Commentary by StevoTVR
Tags: legal, plagiarism