Blog plagiarism ? Have you ever faced illegal threats ? what is this all about ? first we have to look about the some definitions of the plagiarism and blogging then we can understand the concept of Blog Plagiarism.
Plagiarism itself is not a legal term as such however it have been used several time in lawsuits. The word plagiarism itself can be defined in several way from copying the entire work of some body and publishing it in your name or claiming this to be yours or by borrowing someone else’s original ideas. The underlying seriousness of offense varies with reference to the context or on whether the whole content is copied as such or some one have borrowed or not an idea. The coping of ones original work word by word or without permission is an offence but regarding borrowing an idea or two persons are working in similar area independently there arise few questions
1. Can Idea Be Stolen?
2. Is there any possibility that more then one person think alike?
3. What about general news items?
4. What about different general topics?
Now I will discuss these in some details. Yes Idea can be stolen but some time it is very difficult to prove the theft of an idea. And some time without steeling an idea two person contribute in a similar area as human brain may think alike and more then one person may think on a similar topic, area or concept. For example these days many world economist are thinking alike to find a solution to the global recession. Many scientist are working hard to find a cure to the cancer etc.Some time if there is a breaking news around then every one have the right to explain or write on this in his own style this does not mean they are committing plagiarism e.g If we look at these two news items Google is soon launching orkut aaps, Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo. So more than one news agency, person may be working on these news with or without telling their internel resources within these organizations.
Some time if there are current issues being faced by the world, country or any specific area e.g Global Recession (worlwide) , Long March (Pakistan) , Restoration of Judges (Pakistan), Peace Talks (India and Pakistan) , Social Media (World Wide and Locally) so any intellectual or writer can pick any of these topics and can explain his/her own ideas on the issue and can put forward his/her own suggestions , can writenews columns but this does not mean that some one have patented these open topic, current issues that only one person can write on this and others can not as if they do they will commitplagiarism.
Now let us come to the concept of blogging. What is a blog and what is blogging all about? Blog is defined as “A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings” or it can also be defind as “(WeBLOG) A Web site that contains dated text entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) ” or Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.
The above definitions indicate a blog is not a classified research journal (although you may publish research items), nor a news paper (although you may publish news items) but is more a kind of web diary or digital diary where any person can put his own thoughts, his own personal collections and experiences, share his knowledge , can bookmark items of his interest and can do a log more. So in a way there are not strict regulations as for a propernews paper or a research journal for your formatting and writing styles.
Now let us come to the point of Blog Plagiarism what is this all about? As we have discussed above plagiarism is copying ones work and pretending as it is your same is true for Blog Plagiarism i.e by copying the entire set of articles , posts or a single post, article from ones blog and claiming it as your own work. Many people are committing this by using some online automatic tools i.e feedpress plug-in for wordpress or soft wares like auto-blog etc. As a results RSS feeds from others blogs are being copiedword by word from one blog to an other blog. Google and other search engines have realized these problems and now such kind of content copying is being discouraged in terms of search engine rankings.
As many bloggers have common areas of interest most of the time these are working on related topics knowing or without knowing ther bloggers work. eg. How to install windows on a new machine?, What is Linux copy command? I am a Big Fan of Web 2.0 Technologies and many other related topics. As I have mentioned earlier blogging is not a kind of very classified code of writing so it is not essential to perform a review of literature before writing a blog.
So any one can post any thing at any time . If some one has not copied the entire word to word post of others either by RSS feed parsing or manually and have writtenhis own blog without coping any thing from any where else he is not committing the act of Plagiarism. There may be chance that since you are woking in a similar area some time you may receive illagle threats by other shameless bloggers. These shameless bloggers consider internet as their personal property and think that no one else have right to expresshis own point of view on a particular area of intrest. We all should condemn such bloggers.
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