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[How to] Fight Plagiarism on WordPress.com?

06 Jul, 2009 by
Tutorial, Wordpress

wordpress-plagiarism

WordPress, as we know is arguably the most popular blogging platform currently. One can either download the open source blog publishing application and self-host it on their server and domain or sign-up for an account on WordPress.com to get started with a pre-hosted / pre-installed blog publishing application.

What this means is, anyone with a bare minimum knowledge on hosting/domain registration etc can signup for an account and get started within few minutes. And many a times, people grossly misuse this facility by indulging in illegal and unethical activities. One of them is PLAGIARISM.


Plagiarism refers to “use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work”

plagiarism

There has been a steep increase in number of blogs hosted on WordPress.com and Blogger directly copying the posts in recent times. Last month I bumped across atleast 3 blogs (2 of them hosted on WordPress.com) who were copying the articles “as-is”. They were even hot-linking to the images hosted on my website.

How to handle Plagiarism on WordPress.com hosted blogs?

1. First of all, try to contact the blog author and let him know that you are aware of him copying your blog posts and warn him to either remove the posts or give a proper link back to the original posts. Many a times this works out.

2. If the author is stubborn or too dumb to understand the warnings, then contact WordPress.com directly. You can either open a thread in WordPress.com support forums or contact the support team directly. The forum moderators are pretty active and generally start replying within a day.

3. In my case, one of the blogs was copying almost every post. This was getting out of my hands and just when I was thinking about filing a DMCA complaint, I got to know about this page on Automattic. Yes! You can directly go ahead and file a DMCA complaint by mailing to dmca@automattic.com with relevant details as given in the article. I was pleasantly surprised to get a response from the WordPress team within half a day, informing me that the blog has been suspended from immediate effect.

Wonderful support and quick response from the Automattic (WordPress) team. I believe even Google has this provision of filing online DMCAs, but their response time is known to be pretty bad.

Image Courtesy: ericstoller & unsw

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Raju is the founder-editor of Technically Personal. A proud geek and an Internet freak, who is also a social networking enthusiast. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter. Mail Raju PP.
  • http://www.techpavan.com Pavan Kumar

    Google’s DMCA is pathetic as I have read somewhere. You need to file complaint through faxing them to get the result removed from google results for plagiarism / copyright infringement.

    • http://techpp.com Raju

      @Pavan,
      ya, even I heard Google being super slow in acting upon, but faxing the complaint is no more mandatory. Online filing of DMCA is allowed from the link I have given in the post

  • http://www.websparkstudio.com Meg
  • http://www.techno360.in Ramakanth

    How to file a compliant if a site is self hosted on wordpress.
    I had a problem with site a called tothepc.co.cc

    • http://techpp.com Raju

      @Ramakanth,
      That is a bigger issue. I guess Amit from labnol.org has written a detailed post on that. In brief
      1) Leave a comment under the post which is copied
      2) See if there is a contact form and mail the owner with a warning
      3) If the issue still persists, check who the web host is and mail them in detail about the issue

  • http://www.techno360.in Ramakanth

    Thanks for providing information,i will check out labnol.org

  • http://www.techno360.in Ramakanth

    with your support today I all most won the situation without any DMCA .First I thought only one site,but there are 3 similar sites,sent copyright infringement complaint to all hosting providers,they responded very quickly and they assured me that they will remove the content or site within 4 hrs and I came here to give a big Thanks to Techpp and Labnol

    • http://techpp.com Raju

      @Ramakanth,
      I am glad I could be of some help :)

  • http://ducedo.com/ Stefan

    It’s weird to see how many people that are using this method to get visitors. I recently decided to start blogging in English and within a day there were 3 sites stealing my content. Weird how fast it goes..

  • http://greatsalesstrategy.blogspot.com Abdel

    Great stuff, thank you so much :) keep it up

  • Wise Step

    Plagiarism has been always an issue from the beginning

  • Pingback: Top 100 Blogs about Plagiarism |

  • bobwhite

    This appears to be an excellent article but why in the world would you choose to post in color combinations that are so hard to read?

  • güvenlik kamera

    thnk kamera

  • http://www.plagtracker.com/ Mary

    I agree. Plagiarizing can be really annoying especially when you have put so much hard work in to it. In this technological age it’s happen very often. This leads to the original website owner losing page rankings, traffic and revenue. Theft of website content is a rapidly growing problem and owners should check their content frequently to find out whether it is being used somewhere else. I use this plagiarism checking service http://www.plagtracker.com/ Their service uses a vast amount of resources in plagiarism checking and offers up to 10 papers check for free.
     

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