I love blogs.  As you know I run a couple for my own company (Hamilton House) and also oversee a few for other companies too.

Sometimes I find people copying the articles that we publish – indeed we have a case running at the moment where a rival blog is lifting one series of articles on one of the blogs I run and re-publishing them as their own.   We’re just starting to make this public.

And it seems we are not the only people who have this problem.  The following story is taken from the excellent Marketing Vox daily news service (full reference to the story at the end of my piece).

The story begins with “Cooks Source”, a food magazine, which picked up a story that was on the internet, and re-ran it without permission.  It was apparently a piece about the history of apple tarts.

When the plagiarism was made public the magazine had the audacity to say that “the web is considered “public domain” and that Gaudio [the blogger] should be grateful for the free-of-charge editing she gave the piece, which was poorly written in the original.”

The blogger printed this in her blog, and then readers and bloggers from all over started to get involved, eventually finding various other pieces that look as if they have been plagiarised in the magazine.  They immediately went public.

Next, according to Marketing Vox, the bloggers turned on the magazines advertisers, threatening to boycott all of them unless they disassociated themselves from the plagiarising publisher.  Here’s how Marketing Vox report this element of the story…

“2nd Street Baking Co. in Turners Falls, Mass., was an advertiser. Owner Laura Puchalski told Boston.com she began to receive angry e-mails within hours of Gaudio’s story going national. Then she began getting threats of boycotts. “We were getting e-mail after e-mail – 50 or 60 e-mails,” she said.  “Some of them were really very nasty – like, ‘How dare you support plagiarism?’” The company pulled its advertising shortly after, although Puchalski said she would have done so without the threats.”

So, the message is, there’s some great stuff on the internet.   But it is protected by copyright just as all other writing is.

http://www.marketingvox.com/update-cooks-source-succumbs-to-internet-savaging-048150/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink

Tony Attwood