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Tag Archive: plagiarism

Monday Meme: Eleven Word Blog Post

Written on April 4, 2011 by Brent Ozar in SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Copy, paste, copy, paste. I just love ~~plagiarizing~~ helping the community.

Tom LaRock challenged us to write an eleven word blog post and I couldn’t resist resurrecting an old theme. John Dunleavy (who plagiarized my posts last year) emailed me a while back to say he’d like to meet me at the DevConnections conference in Orlando and buy me a drink to apologize. I really admired his guts. It takes huge drawers to make that kind of request, and I respect that. We went out to dinner and had a wonderful time.

A wise man once told me that carrying a grudge is like swallowing poison and hoping the other guy dies. Another wise man told me that DevConnections feels like the PASS Summit, only without the backstage drama. Life is short enough as it is. We can’t succeed by forcing others around us to fail – and in fact, it’s often the opposite. I feel most successful when those around me succeed. I don’t want any event, blogger, presenter, or consultant to fail. I want us all to find our niche, our moral compass, and our happiness.

Life is a never-ending journey of learning our own lessons and helping those around us learn theirs. If people had given up on me when I made my first mistakes, I’d be homeless right now. I’m only here because my bosses and my peers saw enough value in me to be patient with my problems and help me get better. Every time that I can pay that forward is a success.

What can you do to mend a fence today and help someone become a success?

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Plagiarism Week: Pilfered Presentations

Written on November 19, 2010 by Brent Ozar in SQL Server, Writing and Presenting

I’m angry when people steal my blog posts. I’m bummed when people give away pirated PDF copies of our book. But the very worst feeling for me is when someone steals my presentations.

Step Up

I pour dozens of hours into each of my 45-60 minute sessions. For every single one, I have to:

Write the story
Build the slide deck
Pick just the right images and properly attribute them under Creative Commons
Take product screenshots or write demo code
Build a resources page on my site
Rehearse
Rehearse
Rehearse some more
Give the presentation at the local level, figure out what works and what didn’t, tweak the slide deck to refine it, and then start the rehearsal process again
Eventually build up to presenting it at the national level

Some national conferences require me to upload my slide deck ahead of time, and every time I do it, I cringe. I would love for every attendee to be able to use my slides as a set of notes for later reminders, but I’m terrified because of what plagiarists do with my slides. Yes, people actually re-give my presentations, and I’m not the only one who’s fallen victim. Here’s what you need to know before you submit an abstract to a conference:

Read the recording rights in the speaker contract. When you present at a major conference, you sign a speaker contract with that conference that gives the conference organizers certain rights. Most conferences record video or audio of your session, and you need to be aware of what happens with those recordings afterward. Some conferences like TechEd and SQLBits give the recordings away for free on the web, and some conferences like the PASS Summit sell the recordings. If you pour a lot of time into building a session, and then people can view it for free over the web, you’ll have a tough time selling that content yourself later. People will be less likely to pay for a pre-con session if they can get that same material for free online.

Find out if “recording” includes transcription posting rights. Some conferences have different ideas of what the word “recording” means. I’ve worked with one conference that decided to take transcriptions of my session and publish them as separate articles on their web site. That would have been okay with me if they’d have taken the time to use a spell checker and to polish the articles, but here’s what the article ended up looking like:

“Perfmon is real important. As you can see here on the scren, when the Disck Reads metric is above this numbur, evertyhing is fine, but when it’s below this, pick your job up off the floor and…”

Since the article had my name on it, I was horrified, and I asked the conference to take it down immediately. I volunteered to clean the article up myself at no charge because I’d rather lose money and look good than ignore it and look stupid. Thankfully, they agreed to take it down period, but I learned my lesson – I won’t sign another speaker agreement that allows the conference to post transcriptions that I haven’t been able to approve ahead of time.

Find out if “recording” includes the slides. One conference’s contract includes the PowerPoint deck as part of the recording, then says the conference can do anything they want with the recording. You have to read between the lines to figure out that this includes the ability to do anything they want with your slide deck, including taking your identifying information out and letting other people re-present your presentation! Over the last couple of weeks, Adam Machanic, Gail Shaw, and I have been engaged in a struggle with a particular conference’s organizers. The conference took previously presented decks, gave them to other presenters, and let them re-present the material. I’m not going to name the conference because they’re working with us to improve how they handle ownership of presentations, thank goodness. The frustrating part is that I had to repeatedly explain to the conference organizers just how bad this would be for their image if it became public.

Ideally, know your rights even before you submit an abstract. Some conferences will honor your requests for changes, but only if you make that a part of your abstract submission. Having gone through the above messes, I know that certain conference organizers want me to say “This presentation and abstract is copyright Brent Ozar, and no rights are transferable to anyone else without my express written permission ahead of time.” I’m frustrated that I have to even tell them that, but it is what it is, and if I don’t include that in the abstract then I may have to back out of the conference later when the speaker contract arrives.

Decide when you’re willing to let presentations go to the public. For certain events, I give attendees my PowerPoint slides because I want them to re-deliver my presentations. I want my SQLCruise attendees to take their new-found knowledge back to the office, then give the presentations to their coworkers. Their boss will see the value gained by sending someone on the cruise, and then hopefully pay for the attendee to return each year. However, I make it really clear to the attendees that they’re not allowed to present these decks in public or to user groups. For other events, I build decks knowing full well that they’ve got an expiration date – I won’t ever be able to attract as many in-person viewers once the presentation is available on the web for free.

Share PDF copies of your presentation, not the PowerPoint original. When attendees and conferences want copies of your slide decks, don’t give them the PPTX files. Give them an exported PDF copy of the slides, which is good enough for people who need to verify that you’ve got content ready or want to take notes. When people insist on getting the PowerPoint slides, ask them why, and don’t be satisfied with brush-off answers. You’re the content owner – take control of your content.

Set up Google Alerts for your presentation titles and abstracts. It really bums me out to even have to type that, but the reality is that plagiarism isn’t going away. When you get a hit, politely approach the speaker and ask, “I see that you’re presenting on The Top 10 Ways to Make Microsoft Access Stop Sucking. That sounds a lot like a presentation I did last month, and I’d love to hear more about your ideas.” When a speaker truly didn’t know about your presentation, they’ll be excited to bounce ideas off you. On the other hand, if they were planning on plagiarizing your work, they’ll adjust their plans accordingly. If they don’t respond in a way that gives you the warm-and-fuzzies, email the conference organizers and give them a heads-up.

Finally, don’t use copyrighted material in your own presentations. Movie pictures, album covers, and other people’s photos are generally off-limits. Instead, use my post on Finding Free Pictures for Blog Posts and Presentations.

Brent Ozar

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Plagiarism Week: Finding the Slimy Slimeballs

Written on November 18, 2010 by Brent Ozar in SQL Server, Writing and Presenting

When I complain about plagiarism, I hear the same thing over and over from other bloggers: “Nobody ever plagiarizes me. I guess I’m not that important.”

Really? So you’ve been checking to see if your stuff has been copied?

“Uh, no….”

Exactly. It’s time to find out how.

Watch Your Trackbacks and Incoming Links

Odds are your blog posts will include links back to your own site at some point, like when you refer to your other posts. The quickest way to stay on top of this is to glance at the “Incoming Links” module in your WordPress dashboard:

WordPress Dashboard

In that screenshot, I can see that Steve Jones, Tom LaRock, Stacia Misner, Ted Kreuger, and “unknown” have all linked to my site recently. By glancing at that list, I can see that most of those are completely okay, but the “unknown” one gives me pause, so I’d click on that to make sure it’s a legit blog. On a side note, you should always monitor these anyway, click on all of the links, and read what people are saying about you.

Another built-in WordPress tool is the list of pingbacks. When people copy your work verbatim and publish it, their blog may try to send a pingback link alerting you. Go into your Comments list and filter it by pings only:

Pingback Comments

In that screenshot, I can see that Sean Gallardy has linked to my SQL Server checklist. I would want to click on that link to make sure it’s not an exact word-for-word copy of my own checklist, or another one of my blog posts that happened to link to my own checklist.

Set Up Free Google Alerts

Even if the plagiarist is smart enough to disable pingbacks, they probably won’t strip the links out of your blog posts. To catch those, I set up Google Alerts for real-time notifications; whenever Google runs across the word “BrentOzar.com” anywhere on the web, they send me an email. I can tell at a glance if it’s a plagiarized post, a forum question pointing to one of my articles, or a blog comment. I’ve set up similar alerts for sites I manage, my name, companies I work for, and so on.

When I’ve built a blog post I’m particularly proud of, I even set up Google Alerts for key phrases in the post. For example, in my SQL Server 2008 DAC Pack blog post, I used the phrase “Bringing Sexy DAC.” I can be fairly certain that phrase will not come up often, and if it shows up on the intertubes, somebody’s stealin’ my work. That phrase is a little down the page, beyond the first paragraph, so it shouldn’t show up if someone’s only showing the first few sentences of my post (which would be okay.) I set up a Google Alert for that, and if anybody is automatically reposting my work, I get notified.

(Yes, I’ve deleted that Google Alert now because I know by saying this, I’m going to get a bunch of tweets saying “I’m Bringing Sexy DAC!” Heh. I love you people.)

Monitor Your Referrers

If you’re using web analytics tracking to see how (un)popular your site is, it probably has a screen to show which sites are linking to you. In my favorite free web analytics tool, Google Analytics, it’s under Traffic Sources, Referring Sites:

Referring Sites

Because the plagiarist may not be popular yet, you need to go through ALL of the referring sites, not just the top ten. The more popular you get, the more painful this gets, but on the plus side, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling seeing everybody linking to you in a good way.

I go through this list looking for sites I don’t recognize, then I drill into the analytics to find out exactly where in the site they’re coming from, and I click on it. Hopefully it’s not an exact copy of one of my posts that links to another one of my posts.

Use Tynt.com to Tweak Copy/Paste

This has to be one of the coolest tools I’ve ever seen. The easiest way to understand how it works is to see it in action. Go to any page on BrentOzar.com, select some text, copy it, and then paste it into a text editor:

Tynt Paste Results

SHAZAM. It doesn’t get much more obvious than that. I used to use more polite wording, but after being repeatedly plagiarized, I’m going with the big guns now.

Tynt even gives you a slick dashboard to show where your content is being pasted:

Tynt Insight Dashboard

And it’s even completely free! Go sign up for Tynt today, put their Javascript code in your header, and you’re off and running. (The technique of doing this varies by which blog theme you’re using.)

Search Manually with Copyscape.com

Finally, every now and then I go searching for copies of my recent posts with Copyscape.com. I put in a URL to a recent post (30-60 days old), and Copyscape goes hunting for similar copies. Their logic is pretty fuzzy, and it gives me a lot more misses than hits, but when it hits, it hits big time. It catches plagiarists who are smart enough to disable trackbacks, strip out your links, and even futz with your wording to try to make it look different.

Copyscape Results

This is how I caught CrazySQL initially, and how I found that BugoSQL was trying to hide some of my posts in disguised PDF files.

It’s a lot of work catching these diabolical bastards, and it’s like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. I have to keep playing because I make a living off my content – it’s my marketing tool to bring in new consulting customers. This is especially important to me now that I’ve become a full time consultant; I don’t get paid unless I’m working for a client. I’m not getting paid to write this, either, but I do it because I’m passionate about helping the community and helping bloggers protect their content.

Brent Ozar

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Plagiarism Week: Caught Another One

Written on November 15, 2010 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

Every now and then I get enough content piled up about a subject that I decide to dedicate a whole week-long blog post series to it. The good news is that you’ll have plenty of original material to read this week, but the bad news is that you’ll also have copied material too. Welcome to Plagiarism Week!

When I was researching material for my FreeCon, I wanted to show bloggers how to optimize their site for search engines. One of the topics involved putting related images in each blog post; if you’ve got a story about SQL Server setup checklists, you should put screenshots in there and tag them appropriately. Search engines recognize that your post is more complete than others because it’s got eye candy.

To illustrate it, I went to Images.Google.com and searched for SQL Server setup checklists because I’m quite fond of my setup checklist post and it does well in search engines. The results look like this:

SQL Server Setup Checklist Search Results

The third result is mine, and I recognized it immediately because the screenshot had my company’s SQL Server name in it (from the time I wrote the post). The majority of the images on the page do indeed relate to SQL Server, but some of them are surprising. For example, the baby’s face at the bottom left might seem odd, but it’s actually from the comment avatars on my blog post. The one that intrigued me most was result #4 – the MCITP logo. That’s a pretty high-ranking result for such a generic picture – the content must be fantastic! So I clicked on it:

Plagiarism Strikes Again

Wow, that is indeed some good content. Of course, I might be a little biased, because it’s my checklist.

Compare the copied checklist screenshot above (no, I’m not going to link to that guy’s site) to my SQL Server setup checklist, and you’ll notice that he stripped out my introductory paragraphs where I talk about building these checklists through my years of experience. He didn’t just delete my personal text, he also went to the effort of deleting every link back to my site, including the images. He even merged my Part 1 and Part 2 pages together to avoid linking to me.

This isn’t a casual copy/paste job or an RSS tool – this is a hard-working plagiarist who had managed to circumvent every protection I’d built into the blog. He had ads on the checklist, and he’d managed to rise to the first page of Bing results:

Bada Bing

I hadn’t caught this guy earlier because I use Google, and he doesn’t show up in Google’s results. No, I’m not saying Bing promotes plagiarism – I’m just saying it’s like the high school teacher who didn’t quite catch on that you copied your term paper from mine.

I followed the steps in my article What to Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Posts. I contacted the author via the email on his About Me page and LinkedIn profile, neither of which I’m going to link to here. When someone links to your web site, search engines believe you have a more credible web site, and I’m not about to give this guy any Google juice. When he didn’t respond to emails, I filed DMCA takedown notices with his web host, WordPress.com, which has always been extremely responsive for me. I love how WordPress protects the rights of authors whose content has been stolen:

I <3 WordPress

I wasn’t his only victim. He stole multiple posts from Microsoft, too, like this one:

64-Bit Computing

Two-bit Blogger

The bad news is that he may have stolen your content, too. Since he went to great lengths to disguise my content, I’m guessing he may have disguised yours too, so it’s time to spend some time reading his web site:

Plagiarist

If you interact with this author, I have two requests. First, keep it civil – he’s a real guy somewhere with a real life and a real job. He made mistakes, and he’s about to learn from them, but it’s not like he killed anybody. I could have emailed my contacts at his employer, but I don’t want to ruin his life – I just wanted the plagiarism to stop. Keep the punishment in perspective. Second, don’t make racial comments – remember that the last big plagiarism scandal around here was a white guy from the US. It can happen anywhere to anyone.

Brent Ozar

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Plagiarism, Inspiration, and John Dunleavy

Written on March 23, 2010 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

John Dunleavy, owner of SQLTech Consulting in Philadelphia, PA, has been engaging in an interesting conversation with me and a few other authors on Twitter. Denny Cherry also recapped the conversation.

I first spoke with John a few months ago when I caught him plagiarizing my work – not using it for inspiration, but simply copying it. He posted my full articles on his blog without quoting them or showing that they were from me. I pointed him to my FAQ on blog plagiarism, and after some strong discussions, he agreed to remove my work from his blog. Evidence of the plagiarism still lives on in Google’s cache, unfortunately:

Google Cache for SQLTechConsulting.com

Over the last couple of days, we’ve revisited his site, and we’ve found that John has continued to copy the work of others without proper attribution. Here’s an example:

SQLTechConsulting Article

The post has no quotes around it, and it says things like “we have achieved 99.99 percent uptime.” The article says “by John” at the top, and the reader would assume that the “we” means John.

But every single word is copy/pasted from this Microsoft TechNet whitepaper by David Smith of ServiceU Corporation. That whitepaper is covered by Microsoft’s copyright at the bottom, which explicitly states that:

“You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from the Services.”

John chose to ignore that copyright, and he defended his actions on Twitter by saying:

John Dunleavy Quote

He’d rather ask forgiveness than permission. Unfortunately, that’s not fair to the authors. It’s not fair to make hard working guys like me chase down people who are stealing our work, then ask them to stop. The answer is for them to stop stealing work to begin with, but it’s tough to argue that when the other person believes they’re helping people:

John Dunleavy Quote

Me, I’m not good at building operating systems, but that doesn’t give me the right to pirate Windows. And it certainly doesn’t give me the right to share that pirated software with others, even if I’m not making money doing that sharing. John tries to hide behind the community flag:

John Dunleavy Quote

The problem with John’s noble goals, though, is that he is indeed running ads and making money. The entire site is an advertisement for John’s consulting company, SQLTech Consulting. If you click Services at the top of the page, he offers database administration:

SQLTech Consulting

It isn’t as if he’s running a personal web site – he’s running a business. That’s especially ironic given that he asks:

SQLTech2 Quote

I’d be happy to answer that question. I help others by working my tail off to write original posts & articles, then I give them away to the community personally. I build original presentations, rehearse them over and over, and then deliver them free over the web in high definition.

I work so hard because I want people to associate me and my employer, Quest Software, with SQL Server expertise, community building, and trust. I get paid to build a trustworthy bridge between you and Quest. If you have a SQL Server issue, I want you to know that you can come to me personally and get an absolutely honest and correct answer. If the answer is a script you can just download for free off SQLServerPedia, I’ll point you to that. If the answer is somebody else’s product, I’ll tell you that.

But I line my pockets because sometimes the best answer is a Quest product, and I’ll point you to it, but I won’t sell it to you. If you ever feel like I’m shoving a product down your throat, I want you to call me out on it, because Quest wouldn’t allow that. Billy Bosworth, the head of our database software group, talks about why that’s so important in his post How SQLServerPedia Is Different.

I would give anybody in the SQL Server community the shirt off my back. I’ve helped my competitors, I’ve pointed people to competitors’ products, and I’ve gone out of my way to consistently do the right thing. But that’s not enough for John Dunleavy, who wants to reuse the work of others without so much as quoting or attributing it, and he says:

SQLTech2 Quote

This is the heartbreaking part about helping the community. The vast, vast majority of the SQL Server community is made up of phenomenal people who feel the same way I do. They drop everything to give #SQLHelp, they volunteer to share their knowledge at local user groups, and they give their work away for free on their blogs.

It’s only a tiny minority who abuse the rest of us.

Update 3/23/2010 – It Gets Worse

Upon further investigation, Denny Cherry discovered that John Dunleavy had plagiarized more material. John stole Denny’s work for a T-SQL Tuesday blog post, changed some words, and passed it off as his own. Now John really can’t argue that he was just publishing pointers to other peoples’ work – he was doctoring their work and publishing it without any attribution whatsoever.

If you’re a small business looking for a database consultant,
you should know how that person treats data that belongs to others.

Update 3/29/2010 – John Removed the Material

John saw the light, and he’s removed the offending material. He’s asked me to remove this post as well, saying he never stole anyone’s work – merely used it without attribution. I declined, but I’ve offered him the chance to write a paragraph to explain his stance here.

Brent Ozar

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Friday Linkpost (I Know, Right?)

Written on January 15, 2010 by Brent Ozar in SQL Server

It’s been a while since I did one of these, and I’m going to kind of cheat. These aren’t my bookmarks for the week – they’re actually short things I’ve been meaning to blog about, but haven’t had the time. Might as well lob them out now or forever hold my peace. My excuse for not writing more often is that I went on a cruise last week with Mom and had a great time.

These margaritas are for Mom. Honest.

PASS Summit Evaluations Out – the speaker feedback results are in, and I got #8 in the top 10 sessions overall! Yay, me! My session on social networking with Jason Massie got 5th overall in the Professional Development track too. Allen Kinsel blogged about the data, and you can read the results here. Big congratulations to all of the presenters who scored on these reports, and for those of you who didn’t, you’re still winners in my book. It takes huge guts to stand up on stage and deliver your presentations. Keep in mind that your fellow database professionals are paying to hear you speak – that’s the ultimate evaluation.

Kevin Kline tagged me in his goalpost – and viciously accused me of drinking Zima. I would like to make it perfectly clear that I’m a Bartles and Jaymes man, and thank you for your support.

Denis Gobo interviewed me about the book – and about the authoring process in general. Read the interview at his blog.

EWeek published an article of mine – about how to develop a good database backup and recovery strategy.

StackOverflow is building an API – if you want to interact with StackOverflow, ServerFault, and SuperUser via programming APIs, now’s your chance to get your voice heard.

Lots of Azure buzz – Azure goes commercially live next month, and there’s a lot of good articles and videos coming out. OakLeaf Systems does a fantastic job of recapping the most recent activity, as evidenced by their most recent cloud recap. If you like that kind of info, I highly recommend their blog. They did a great analysis on the Azure SLA/NDA problem.

Windows Azure lessons learned at Quest – we’re building an on-demand version of our apps hosted in the cloud. Quest cloud guru Dmitry Sotnikov did an interview with Channel9 about the lessons we’ve learned.

According to Bing, I’m runner-up for the sexiest DBA – with first place going to Rhys Campbell, author of TweetSQL, and I can’t deny the sexy in that.

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.9 – and yes, you care, because one of the features in 2.9 is the ability to embed videos easier, and the videos even show up in RSS feeds. Brace yourself – I have big, big plans for this, and no, they don’t all involve videos of Vince Offer and Ken Block.

There’s a plague of plagiarism going around – somebody else is ripping off my material along with other prominent bloggers’ stuff. Todd McDermid talked about the incident, Denny Cherry responded to Todd, and Jorge Segarra used my words to illustrate the point. After reading Todd’s article, I’m rethinking my reaction, and I’m trying to relate it to real-world examples of tangible thefts.

In my travels, I visit a few museums, and they all have different policies on taking pictures. Sometimes you’re not allowed to use tripods, but you can use a point & shoot camera. Sometimes you can use any camera or tripod, but you have to pay a fee. Sometimes it’s a free-for-all. I try to ask the museum when I enter, but people don’t always understand the question, especially in foreign countries where the only words I can speak involve beer or bathrooms.

I’ve learned over time that whenever I try to take a picture in a museum, I should go nice and slow, making it clear that the nearest guard sees what I’m about to do long before I set up the shot. I can see how the guard is going to react, and then I know for sure whether or not it’s okay. That informal interaction tells me what’s okay – and what’s not okay.

It’s hard to do that in blogs. I think there’s people out there who think they’re not doing any harm by taking a picture of my work and hosting it elsewhere. I talked about why it’s wrong in my post More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism, but copy/pasters don’t read my archives. It really pains me to do this, but what I’m going to do is add a footer in my RSS feed saying something like this:

“Before you copy my work, please read this article. Readers – if you’re reading this anywhere other than BrentOzar.com, email me at BrentO@BrentOzar.com. If your tip results in me finding an unauthorized copy of my work, I’ll give you a $20 Amazon gift card.”

I really, really hate doing that, but people keep right on plagiarizing my work. If anybody else has better ideas, I’d love to hear ‘em.

Update 1/15 – David Stein wrote a funny post about the plagiarism.

Brent Ozar

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More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism

Written on June 29, 2009 by Brent Ozar in SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

In the aftermath of the InformationFlash plagiarism incident, several questions have come up from the site’s webmaster and from other bloggers.

Is it okay if the plagiarizer isn’t making money?

No. Authors work really, really hard to create their original content. Seeing someone else pass it off as their own, whether there’s a charge or not, reduces the value of our hard work.

If I took the whole content of The Manga Guide to Databases and reproduced it here on my blog, I wouldn’t be making a dime off it. However, I’d be robbing the author of income. Even if that author was giving away the work for free, the author might be benefitting in a way that I don’t understand yet, so I need to contact the author before republishing their copyrighted work.

Is it okay if I don’t understand my blog aggregation software?

No. If you pick up a gun, it’s your responsibility to understand how it works. The first time it accidentally goes off and shoots somebody, you might be able to get away with claiming you didn’t know it was loaded. After several people complain about gunshot injuries, though, you need to put the gun down.

Just as you can go to a local gun club to learn about firearm safety, you can get help with RSS aggregators too. Post a message in the product’s support forum, contact other users of the product, or post a message on StackOverflow. But whatever you do, don’t wave that thing around until you understand what you’re doing.

Shouldn’t the bloggers change their feeds to prevent theft?

Bloggers can choose whether to include the full article or just a few words in the RSS feed. In my series on how to start a technical blog, I recommend using the full article because readers like it a lot more. They don’t want to click through to read your full article on your site. (Personally, I hate the holy hell out of blogs who just include the abstract, and their content has to be insanely good for me to subscribe to one of those kinds of blogs.)

Even if the blogger changes their feed to just include an abstract, it still doesn’t prevent syndication sites from stealing content with screen-scraping techniques. Then the naysayers would say, “It’s the blogger’s fault for not requiring a username and password in order to read the blog.”

If we have another site pop up like InformationFlash, I’ll probably end up including a copyright note at the bottom of every blog entry. It’ll say something like, “If you’re not reading this article at BrentOzar.com or SQLServerPedia.com, it was stolen.” I hate doing that, though, because it looks crappy. It’s like bolting the TV remote to the nightstand.

Is it okay if end users submit the copyrighted blogs?

No. When the owner of copyrighted content notifies you that your site has their stuff on it, and they want it taken down, you have to take it down pronto. YouTube is a good example because people try to upload copyrighted data all the time. If the original content owner files a DMCA complaint at YouTube, then YouTube acts quickly to take the content down.

Just as a side note – if you try to claim some other user uploaded the copyrighted content, you need to be *very* prepared to show database records and web server access logs to prove the site administrator wasn’t the one uploading content.

How come it’s okay when Digg or DotNetKicks does it?

Because those sites don’t publish the full content of the article. They show the first few words of the article, and if the reader is interested, they click through to the full content of the article on the blogger’s site.

InformationFlash was showing the entire article, start to finish, without even showing the author’s name. That isn’t promoting the authors at all. To make matters worse, InformationFlash had a Google PageRank of a whopping zero – meaning it wasn’t promoting anyone other than itself by stealing content.

Then is it okay if the site promotes the bloggers?

No. When you’re taking copyrighted content from bloggers, you have to get their permission first, period.

Some authors are completely okay with you republishing their work as long as you attribute them appropriately and link back to them. For example, I’ve told SQL Server Magazine they’re free to use any material from my blog as long as they quote me. (Part of this is a selfish reason: despite what Compete thinks, I’m pretty sure SQL Server Magazine has more readers than I do.)

Is it okay if it’s not illegal?

Even if you register your domain name anonymously and ignore all incoming emails, sooner or later people are going to figure out your real name. They’re going to post your name in public along with an explanation of what happened. That kind of information will turn up in Google searches, and it’ll make for very ugly job interviews and client negotiations down the road.

Besides, don’t you want to be successful? Your site simply can’t become a success by alienating the very people upon whom your site depends for content. You can be successful by working with the community and making sure everything is a win-win. It’s not easy, and it’s not cheap, but it works in the long run.

Stealing is easy and cheap – but the long-term outlook is not so good.

Brent Ozar

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How to Take Action When Your Content is Plagiarized

Written on June 27, 2009 by Brent Ozar in SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

If your copyrighted blog content shows up in whole on another site without proper attribution like InformationFlash.com is doing, here’s a few steps you can take. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), so YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

Send the Webmaster a Cease & Desist Letter

Get a sample cease & desist letter and tailor it to include your own content information. Identify the exact copyrighted blog post that’s showing up on their site.

The webmaster may not be aware of the plagiarism. Sometimes end users post copyrighted material on their own without the webmaster being aware. In other cases, the admin themselves may be doing the copying. Sending a Cease & Desist to the webmaster helps them understand that you didn’t give them permission to post it on their site.

The User Causing All The Problems

Some sites like InformationFlash don’t make it easy – they don’t publish any personal information on their site, and they try to hide behind private domain registrations. They only accept emails through a contact form, thereby making it impossible to guarantee message delivery. No problem – keep reading.

Send Their ISP’s Abuse Department a DMCA Takedown Notice

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects the intellectual property rights of people who create content, like bloggers. Title II of the DMCA is an agreement between you (the copyright holder) and internet service providers (the web hosting company). As long as the copyright holders notify the ISP and the ISP reacts appropriately, then the ISP is not liable for the copyright infringement. Only the plagiarist is liable. That means web hosting companies and internet providers react swiftly and fairly to complaints of copyright infringement.

Get a sample DMCA notice to hosting companies and send it to the web host. In the case of InformationFlash, you can send it to abuse@dreamhost.com. I took the extra measure of sending one DMCA takedown notice per copyrighted article to show the extent of the problem.

Send Search Engines a DMCA Notice Too

If the site’s webmaster and their web host still don’t react, we have another weapon: the search engines. Before doing that, find out if the site even turns up in search results – the search engines may have already received DMCA takedowns for the site in question. Go to your favorite search engine and type the name of your blog post in quotes, like this:

“Top 10 Developer Interview Questions About SQL Server”

Look at the search results and find out if the offending site shows up. In the case of InformationFlash, it doesn’t show up – even if I add the word InformationFlash to the search. That’s awesome – Google’s already figured out that the site’s up to no good. In order to send a DMCA notice to a search engine, you have to show that their site will show up in a search for your work.

Each search engine has a different procedure for getting sites delisted:

Bing’s DMCA Policy
Google’s DMCA Policy (and there may also be a way to email a DMCA notice to Google)
Yahoo’s DMCA Policy
SEOLogic Links to Multiple DMCA Policies

There’s also a sample DMCA notice to search engines that you can use, but make sure to adapt it to each search engine.

Ask for Help From Fellow Bloggers

If you syndicate your blog with SQLServerPedia, email me about the offending site. If you blog at any other site, email the head honcho. All of us are writers, and all of us take plagiarism very, very seriously.

A cynic might ask, “But wait – how is this different than blog syndication at SQLServerPedia?” I’m glad you asked.

You ask us to syndicate your content. We don’t go poaching content.
We work with you to set up specialized feeds so that you choose what to syndicate.
We slather your name all over the place, making it abundantly clear that it’s yours.

If someone takes your syndicated content without your permission, and if you complain to me about it, I will make every effort to go after the offending party with all of the resources available to me. If you want them to syndicate your content straight off your site, that’s completely okay – but they need to take it from your site with your permission, not from SQLServerPedia. You, as a blogger, are completely welcome to syndicate with as many sites as you’d like.

In the case of InformationFlash.com, we’ve already sent them C&D letters, yet they’re still using (y)our content inappropriately. I hate to have to take it to the next step, and I hate to name names in public on my blog. I try to give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and give them time to do the right thing. If they don’t do the right thing, then I want to make sure the public knows the names of the individuals involved and what they’re doing.

My next post will explain why companies should think twice before hiring individuals who plagiarize intellectual property, whether as full time employees or consultants.

Update 6/27: as I expected, InformationFlash syndicated my content despite the post actually being about InformationFlash stealing content. Rather awkward. Here’s a screenshot of their plagiarized content, as well as a screenshot of a blog post they plagiarized from Gail Shaw. Also note the name of the user who submitted the content – either their admin account has been hacked, or the site’s administrator is responsible for plagiarizing the content. The top of the page notes that they aggregate information via RSS, but remember that we’ve already sent them a cease & desist once, and they agreed to do it – they’re just not doing it.

Update 6/28: Dreamhost contacted me and said they’re taking the site down due to our DMCA complaints. It’s not clear whether the takedown is permanent. I want to thank Dreamhost for acting quickly to protect the intellectual property rights of bloggers.

Update 6/29: I got emails with questions from the site’s webmaster and from a few bloggers, so I added the answers in a followup post with More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism.

Brent Ozar

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