Blog Pirates

When more and more people share their thoughts, knowledge, and experience on

their blogs, more and more blog pirates appear.  These pirates not only take the

original photos (some even with the authors' mark on them) or copy paste the

original articles to their blogs but also submit some pieces for other

publications or even blog awards.  Here are some victims:

2007/3/18, cottom_vitas:

This morning, a nice person left a message on my blog and told me that my

article was pirated, together with my photos.  I was shocked...That pirate did

not change a word...She only changed my name to her name, and responded to the

questions and comments on that article...She not only pirated my article but

also others'.  I do not understand.  What's the point of taking other people's

articles as their own life experience?

2007/3/19,cindyfeng:

When I read the content, I do not know if I should cry or laugh at it.  The

conversation between Larry and I became the msn conversation between her friend

and she...My article was posted on 1/18, and she posted it on her blog on 1/9.

She is really fast.

2007/6/15,Mr.&Ms. Days:

We indeed do not like to do the monitoring stuff.  We are already so generous

and allow everyone re-publish the whole article from our website with

attribution and link.  I believe this action (referring the author) is a piece

of cake and should not be a burden to anyone.

2007/7/25,beats:

Should we keep silent because the articles on internet are often plagiarized?

Could it be said that bloggers are blogging for fun so we should tolerate this

kind of plagiarism that publish our words under their name on internet or even

on a book?

I want to emphasize: this is not only blog plagiarism.  This is intentional

hiding the truth and lying.

2007/7/31,Patrick:

When your life becomes others' life...what is your feeling?

When your hard-earned photos and words become someone else's intellectual

property and were sold to the publishers, what is your feeling?

When you do not know that person, but you were referred to as her friend who

traveled with you (almost every time), what is your feeling?

My previous experience about being plagiarized is nothing compared to this one.

This time I can say that it really opens my eye to the internet and pirating

culture in China.  A beautiful summer afternoon was ruined by this issue.  I

start to think about the future of my website.  Maybe I should leave good things

to real publishers.

How can bloggers deal with blog pirates?

Mr. Wednesday tried to develop a tool that can find similar documents on

internet:

Because MMDAYs found their articles were plagiarized recently, Mr. Wednesday

develop a tool named 'Parrot' to solve this kind of problems.  It can be used to

find the documents that are highly similar to your documents.

YC:

From last night till this morning, I have sent three e-mails to three website

administrators, their legal consultants and my lawyer friend.  I am so tired

now.

Up till now, among the two most serious websites, Qianlong.com has already

closed the pirated blog, but Blogbus still keeps updating the blog's contents.

What would be the result of the e-mails?  I am not sure.  Let's wait and see.

Should we put this to the BBS of related websites in China?  This is another

way.  But I do not think it is possible and practical to ask the website

administrators to apologize for this because they are not responsible for these

pirated articles and photos based on their liability claims for the intellectual

property right problems on their website.

cindyfeng:

think in the future it would be better to put my website and my name on my

photos.

If there is no way to prevent these persistent pirates from keeping pirating on

different websites, what will the future blogs look like?

You may view the latest post at

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/08/14/taiwan-the-blog-pirates/