This is a story all about how my life got twisted upside down, and I'd like to take a minute just to sit right here and tell you all about how an a...
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I really wish that the developer community was better about citing sources. I see so much borrowed language from my posts in other people’s, outright cribbed posts, “heavily inspired” or copy and pasted tweets, and repurposed content. I’ve never pursued doing anything about it, but may in the future.
How I check for it: copy and paste a quote from your post in quotation marks into google — can be super surprising.
It doesn’t make you look less legit to add citations or backlinks in your posts. I probably overcite resources in mine — but making content takes a ton of work. Wish people would give credit where credit is due.
That's super awesome that going after it worked!! Too bad it's even a problem though. Thanks for writing this -- super important for people to be aware of!
I definitely agree with you there! Citing sources is not difficult but it can become problematic when you see posts clearly misusing your work by not citing, providing back-links or just taking ownership for work that you created.
I use the same method to check if my work has been plagiarized but it's not something I do often though. I can see why you would have to - you have a more extensive body of work than I do so I can only imagine how it is for you. It sucks to have to deal with it but in my case, I couldn't let it go. You definitely should look into doing something about it! Sometimes it takes a few stern words to get the point across that not citing your sources isn't right and other times it takes hunting down their hosting providers lol 😆
I was half-expecting for it not to work but, I'm glad it did! Thank you Ali, your kind words are much appreciated!
Yes I definitely agree with this. This happened to me on Facebook when someone copied my post word for word without giving credits to the author. I immediately contacted the person through messenger and thankfully the problem was resolved.
Thanks for raising aware to this issue!
Thank you for the informative post Muna!
Occasionally plagiarized material ends up on dev.to, if you ever see this happening email yo@dev.to and we will take the appropriate action as quickly as possible.
Thank you, Ben! :)
Plagiarism is pretty much inevitable, it will happen in some form or another. I'm really glad that dev.to has something in place to aid in the prevention of plagiarized material being shared on the platform.
Oh wow, that must've been awful! I can see how DMCA notices can be misused in the wrong hands. Didn't even think of it like that. Thank you for sharing your experience, I appreciate you taking the time to write about your experience.
you just had me check if my article was plagiarized and I just found it on a site! Thank you 😂😭 @ben I think you should check if they don't pump all the articles from dev.to here.
If you CTRL+F and search for "ethical hacker" you'll find my article.
You can also find it here.
That's not a big deal but if it's redundant it would be problematic, if think.
Sorry to hear that 😮! Some websites use web scrapers to scrape articles from other platforms so it can get out of hand to keep up with who's plagiarized your content.
That's what I was thinking, that's why I mentioned @ben so he could check if there are other people in my case.
In some cases it only means a bot has scraped your posts and copied it onto a spam blog. Sorry to be a downer :(
Besides, if you do want people copying your posts, you can always give permission. You can simply add a line to your profile saying "All my posts are released under XX license". Maybe it's nice to see your writing elsewhere but I think it's even better seeing it with proper credit too.
This 👆🏾
When faced with this same situation in the past, I would reach out to the infringer but start right away with a mention of a DMCA take-down notice. Doing this (even if they were not in the U.S., as a lot of hosts are U.S. based) was usually enough of a motivator for a manual take-down. Otherwise, most hosting providers offer a pretty powerful DMCA take down option directly on their sites.
Glad you found it and they were able to take final action with an email follow up. Thank you for sharing this for others!
Hey Lara, thank you for the suggestion! I'll definitely keep this in mind for the next time this happens. It would save me from having to go back and forth to resolve the issue. How has this method worked out for you in the past?
Thank you for reading it, I really appreciate you taking the time to comment and impart your wisdom about the topic. It'll serve as a helpful guide for others who may face or have faced a similar situation 🙂
Thank you very much, Muna for such a great article. I never thought about checking did any of my blog posts being plagiarized, but I'll do that from now on.
Thank you Damnjan, you're too kind! I'm glad you found the article useful :)
Good story. I like when someone takes action because it prevents these kinds of persons from doing it again and again... at least for some time. I don't care if it's a simple article which could be written by any beginner in particular field or professionally written one. Taking someone else's and presenting as your own and not getting punished is a way for lazy people to get credit and use it later on leaving real workers in same position and maybe even marked as liars while the real thief enjoys results of the hard work. I don't consider IT only for this but real life.
As for distributing stuff like in giving away a copy of something to a friend for free I have a little less strict view but I respect the current situation and law about it. I like to share but I really do care about mentioning the author and giving credits. And if the author has a pretty restrictive license I'd rather not buy that particular item than to violate the "deal" that comes with buying it.
Regarding step 3 in your action plan: another free tool to use is Satori's Hosting Detector - it outputs more relevant information (even on regional domains) and does not display ads/popups :)
Have a great day, Muna! Thank you for this article. It was a good story. Plagiarism has become a huge problem nowadays. It is really difficult to find a good content writing company that writes unique texts without stealing ideas from other resources across the internet. Thanks to the multiple SEO tools and text checker services like copywritely and contentwise.pro/plagiarism-checker provide a good opportunity to filter the incoming content and choose only the unique texts.
Happened to me about six months ago. What was surprising was that this guy was a TA at flat iron school. He plagiarized using synonyms. What gave it away was that he never bothered to change the title and while reading it the structure and articulation matched my article. It was not worth the effort to get him off so many sites on the web. My family stressed more about it than I did. All well known sites were reasonable and took it down post investigation. The only one that didn't clearly did not put in the effort to investigate.
That's wild, do you know if Flatiron was notified? No way would they want to be associated with someone who did that.
Thanks for sharing this