CopyScape - Combatting Plagiarism

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Yesterday I discussed the existence of software tools that steal other people's content in order to make money via advertising. In that post, I mentioned that I was tempted to write a bot that would scan for thieves of my content. Well, as I was submitting that post to Digg, I stumbled upon a service that does just that, Copyscape. Whilst checking a complete website costs money, they have a free service that allows checking a single page for plagiarism. 

Testing Copyscape's free service on the one page that I know was copied correctly identified the website that copied the content. It also listed every page on the Technorati website that contains snippets from that page. Technorati has my permission (by me signing up) to show small snippets. The other site, however, does not. 

Given that the secrvice works and the Copyscape charges are reasonable ($0.05 USD for a single site check and $4.95 USD per month for automated protection), I might perform a scan from time to time. Normally I would not promote products but, in this case, I find the use of automated tools to steal someone else's work and make money off it deplorable. 

Comments (0) | 9 October 2008