Sunday, February 15, 2009

A really good conclusion to a plagiarism case

My last couple of posts here were about someone who seems to have no sense of wrong about copying recipes and so on, even after receiving complaints. That person is still posting copied recipes, though greatly stripped down now, and still getting tons of Twitter followers thanking her for her great recipes and so on. Really a downer. But today I had a very positive experience with another person, so I thought I'd relate it to show that sometimes these exchanges can end on a positive note.

So, someone had copied 4 of my posts and a couple of the photos that accompanied them, back in October or so. I didn't realize it because the person who copied them was smart enough to not link to me directly, but a reader alerted me to the copies yesterday. Not the first time this has happened by any means. Last night I pulled out the standard 'please stop that, copyright, etc.' email and sent it off, not expecting a response anytime soon.

This morning, I got a contrite message from that person, who apologized and said he had taken down the offending posts. But he also said this (edited a bit to protect his identity)


Your message has given me a new perspective [on my blog]. You see, I copied [the articles] back when I was in my gangster stage of life; I was lazy and if i could trick the people around me it was all fine, but now I'm different. I found [programming], which allows me to make things without copying from others. What I did before was bad, but now I'm different, and your message has given me the idea to completely redesign my site! All the suspect articles have been removed and I am in the process of rebuilding [my site].


I am guessing that he's pretty young...and if this incident has really helped to change his thinking, it's a really great! (And yes his site is indeed down at the moment.)

Anyway, his response really made my day, and it made up for all the other, less positive similar situations.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool result, thanks for sharing it. By the way, it looks like the south beach site is down! If so then good job, all of you!

Anonymous said...

It is a good ending, any ending where the plagiarism ends is a good one, and I do hope that this person does have a change in thinking. It wouldn't be the first time that someone has claimed such a revelation to bring an end to a plagiarism charge, but I try to keep myself optimistic...

Great job!

Anonymous said...

very nice your blog..

Anne Lossing said...

I'm not sure how this happened, and I don't think its normal. I just opened my blogs dashboard after several months of not posting ... and i see that Food Blog S'cool is ALSO on my dashboard ... which allows me to enter the inner "works" of your blog and add, delete, change ... whatever. Of course, I don't want to do any of those things, and I find it a huge responsibility to have control of someone else's blog (even if I'm not going to touch it) so I wonder how to go about rectifying this.

Owen said...

Anne,

don't worry. All members of food blog skool have the ability to POST since that is the point - it is like a discussion forum.

But if you go in and look you actually can't do much else - you can't change the layout, you can't mess with other people's posts, etc.

The idea is that you can make new posts when you have somethign to announce to the community.

So don't worry!

Sarah said...

How do you keep people from copying posts and most of all photos from your site? I am having some problems with photos and posts! The recipes are my mostly my own and if not I give credit. However the photos I spend time on and will eventually make a career of it after school.

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