The joy of content plagiarism

One of the nice side effects of our new content management system is that you can leave comments on our articles. We received one rather intriguing comment this week effectively accusing us of plagiarising an article. That came as a bit of a surprise given that I know Denis wrote the article in question several years ago.

Things are complicated slightly because the article is hosted by an article submission site. So, the people who ripped off the article aren’t hosting it on their own site. This does make things more complex because the people who ripped off the article may not be in a position to remove it.

Fortunately, that’s where the DMCA comes in. Google, among many others, will respond to valid DMCA infringement notifications and remove the pages in question from their index.

It is a sad fact that many people believe that the internet is a smorgasbord of content they can steal with impunity to monetise however they please.