Plagiarism and Copy Protection

Our main site, ManilaReviews.com, was recently a victim of plagiarism. Someone was copy-pasting whole articles from our blog onto OpenRice.com. The feeling was a mixture of annoyance and slight amusement. Annoyance because our hard work is just copy-pasted on someone else's self serving page. Amusement because someone thought our articles would give him actual "blogosphere" cred (and because it really was just copy pasted, my wife usually calls me by name on those posts and I was surprised to read "EJ" on many of "his" posts).

My initial thought was to disable copying & right-clicking completely. There are numerous plug-ins and scripts available with the most popular being WP-CopyProtect. It disables right-clicking on your blog and text selection altogether. Pretty powerful.

Now, after some thinking, we decided not to take such drastic a measure. Being a review site, most people probably copy phone numbers, directions, what to order from our site. Also, a surprising number of people (mostly productivity geeks) navigate through the web using the mouse's right-click. Yes, this would stop most plagiarists, but we would also negatively impact even more readers.

Other options include using Tynt which adds a copyright acknowledgement to the copied text. Of course this assumes that plagiarists choose to leave the credit on the pasted text. As a further service, Tynt does offer a service called Tynt insight that tracks the copying being done from your site.

Another option is placing a whos.amung.us banner. This is pretty nifty, not only do you see how many people are online at any point in time on your page, you also see what they copy. Of course you need to pay up to see more options, otherwise you just see previews of what was copied.

Yet another option, and I think the most popular is using Copyscape. All you need to do is go to their website, enter your URL, and it'll show you possible occurences of plagiarism. This is actually how we found the guy lifting our content. Unfortunately, Copyscape only shows you around 3 plagiarism incidents, after that, you have to pay.

We finally decided on using whos.amung.us and periodically checking Copyscape. This would be the least intrusive to our readers and would provide us the with the greatest flexibility.

We also decided to just stop worrying about this whole mess. We still have the golden goose, after all -- no matter how much this person tries -- he won't be able to generate the content that we generate.

How about you? How do you deal with plagiarism?

(picture from ARTS)