Plagiarism on This Site - Page 2 - Writers Forum

Dookie · 01-05-2006, 07:38 PM

UK courts are real easy places. You'd prove ownership with that easily. The magistrate (judge) would probably put a restriction on something or other and impose a fine.

Dookie · 01-05-2006, 07:41 PM

Oh yeah I forgot...when I first joined this site I was worried about theft of work too. Nothing's been stolen so far, to my knowledge, no one on this site gives connotations of being nasty and they all genuinly dont ever cast a single thought on such things. They all have their own work.

dhom · 03-18-2006, 10:20 PM

I've developed a site to look for copied material that's been published to the Web. You can use the site for free. My original intention was to help teachers catch students who were plagiarizing, but it's also been a useful way to see when people have copied my own work.

PlagiarismChecker.com

I've found that a surprisingly high percentage of people who copied my writing gave a link back to my site. Then again, I probably shouldn't be surprised, since I write articles about plagiarism.

mammamaia · 03-19-2006, 06:03 PM

excuse me, but all you're doing is using google or yahoo to do the checking... why should anyone go through your site, when they can do the same thing directly?

glennstewart · 03-20-2006, 12:02 PM

someone should only steal my work, get it published and thus prove to me I really can write marketable material!

Should anyone here find my work worth the effort to steal, I would galdly give it to him or her in a strategic alliance

mammamaia · 03-20-2006, 07:44 PM

i give away all my work, anyway, so it's moot for me...

dhom · 03-20-2006, 09:50 PM

Quote:

excuse me, but all you're doing is using google or yahoo to do the checking... why should anyone go through your site, when they can do the same thing directly?

Good question. There are two reasons:

(1) A lot of people still don't know how to use operators in Google. For example, at the school where I work, it's hard to get teachers to use Google in the first place. It's that much harder to remind them to type quotation marks around the phrases they're searching for. If they do forget and get a lot of false positives, they'll assume that something is wrong with Google, not with the search query.

(2) Plagiarism Checker has the ability to search for multiple phrases and automatically edit queries to fit into Google's limitations. That's why the search box is so big. For example, I could paste the following text into the search box:

Quote:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Here's the search query that Plagiarism Checker generates:

Quote:

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds" OR "Admit impediments. Love is not love" OR "Which alters when it alteration finds," OR "Or bends with the remover to remove:"

I've written a script that automatically adds quotes and the OR operator to each phrase. It also truncates the passage so that the entire query is equal to or less than Google's 32-word limit; any lines less than six words long are deleted to minimize the appearance of false positives.

EDIT: You can also create a Google Alert using a button below the search box and to the right. Google will then send you an e-mail whenever it finds a Web page in its index containing phrases you've written.

Even though I'm familiar with search operators, I still find that searching for plagiarism using my own script saves a lot of time when compared with similar searches using Google's home page.

Of course, no one is obligated to use my site. I just hope that it can make life easier for many teachers and writers.

The Hooded One · 03-20-2006, 10:32 PM

I have to admit I am very worried about someone stealing my ideas adding some of their own and then creating a work. However I am new to this site but I have several great plot ideas to use that I would never paste. What I might paste is sentences or paragraphs from a chapter to have reviewed if I am having problems with it. Anyone have any other arguments that beg to differ?

Beardedtroll · 03-21-2006, 05:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Hooded One

I have to admit I am very worried about someone stealing my ideas adding some of their own and then creating a work. However I am new to this site but I have several great plot ideas to use that I would never paste. What I might paste is sentences or paragraphs from a chapter to have reviewed if I am having problems with it. Anyone have any other arguments that beg to differ?

Ideas don't have any legal protection. Neither patents, trademarks nor copyright protect ideas. It's not only legal to use ideas other people came up with, it's not even frowned upon. The reason for this is that ideas are cheap. Creativity isn't about generating ideas but about making those ideas work.

The only way to protect your ideas would be to write your story without help and then never, ever publish it. If people can "steal" your ideas from your draft, they can steal it from your finished story -- so if you want your story to actually be read by anyone, forget about protecting your ideas.

Mike C · 03-21-2006, 08:53 AM

I never let it bother me. If someone's writing is so piss-poor they have to rip mine off, then so be it; they should be reminded, though, that most mags do search (self preservation).

At the mag I worked on, in over 10 thousand submissions we found a few stories that had been previously published, even though the authors were claiming they weren't, but only one plagiarist. That person only narrowly escaped legal action and I would be very, very suprised if that person ever, ever gets published anywhere. Editors talk.

It does seem a little more common with poetry than with fiction.

The Hooded One · 03-21-2006, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beardedtroll

Ideas don't have any legal protection. Neither patents, trademarks nor copyright protect ideas. It's not only legal to use ideas other people came up with, it's not even frowned upon. The reason for this is that ideas are cheap. Creativity isn't about generating ideas but about making those ideas work.

The only way to protect your ideas would be to write your story without help and then never, ever publish it. If people can "steal" your ideas from your draft, they can steal it from your finished story -- so if you want your story to actually be read by anyone, forget about protecting your ideas.

I was leaning toward written ideas,plot outlines,and prolougue's. Not saying HEY EVERYONE THIS IS MY IDEA WHAT DO YOU THINK! in which you would be right.

PS: Thanks for the input though.

Sincerely - J.C

dhom · 03-21-2006, 09:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beardedtroll

Ideas don't have any legal protection. Neither patents, trademarks nor copyright protect ideas. It's not only legal to use ideas other people came up with, it's not even frowned upon. The reason for this is that ideas are cheap. Creativity isn't about generating ideas but about making those ideas work.

The only way to protect your ideas would be to write your story without help and then never, ever publish it. If people can "steal" your ideas from your draft, they can steal it from your finished story -- so if you want your story to actually be read by anyone, forget about protecting your ideas.

Yes - plagiarism and copyright infringement are different. It's not always possible to enforce consequences for plagiarism, especially when plagiarism consists of taking non-patented ideas.

I wrote an article on the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. I hope it's helpful.

Anne Lacey · 03-21-2006, 11:23 AM

Anything you post here will be dated and can be traced back to your ip address. I'd say that's pretty good protection.

FrankBlissett · 03-21-2006, 12:07 PM

Quote:

This shouldn't be taken as legal advice, but my lawyer once told me a good way of establishing date of authorship is to mail yourself a copy of the manuscript, either complete or in stages as you work on it. Don't open it when it's returned to you; the postage cancellation stamp can serve as evidence in your favor.

I know this has been covered by previous posts, but I'd like to add why it doesn't work. Actually, you can do this at home - for just the cost of an envelope and stamp. Mail yourself a blank, unsealed envelope. A couple days later, take a page from your daily newspaper, fold it up, and put it in the envelope - seal it. Now try to convince your friends that you mailed yourself the winning lottery numbers a couple days in advanced.

If it was accepted as "proof", then enterprising, unethical writers would mail themselves unsealed envelopes and hang on to them for years in anticipation of using them to steal a work. Actually, that's exactly what the other guy's lawyer would claim that you did.

-Frank

Aeternalis · 03-21-2006, 02:11 PM

Dear Dhom:

Thanks to your "Plagiarism Checker" I discovered that a story I posted on this forum in 2003 entitled "The Love of My Life" has been stolen and is being illegally hosted by at least 2 websites, one of them ironically a writing site " www.embracingdreams.net " in which a guy named Garth (the site Admin no less !) posted this story on the board as his own in Oct 2004!

Needless to say, I registered and commented on this foul deed to alert the members this guy was duping. Unfortunately it was an exercise in futility since you can't really do anything about someone plagiarizing your work online when the site Admin himself is the culprit. My posts were promptly deleted and my IP banned, I can't even access the site anymore.

Thankfully, an enhanced version of that particular piece of work has already seen the glorious pinnacle of print publication so I am not too distraught over this. I am actually relieved that I have now stopped posting my work on the internet even if I have had to unfortunately sacrifice the critique, advice, guidance and camaraderie of my fellow writers on this excellent forum. I guess that is the price to pay to escape the fiendish clutches of thieves like Garth. (Sigh!)