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Updated 8/1/2006 12:21 PM ET
Steve McKee, a partner at Albuquerque advertising agency McKee Wallwork Cleveland, found that out in June after he wrote his monthly column for BusinessWeek.com.
The column, entitled "Five Words Never to Use in an Ad," was one of his more popular pieces. A search revealed that 36 blogs had picked it up and posted it to their sites, something that is usually considered to be fair use in the blogosphere. However, to McKee's annoyance, 13 of those took credit for writing it as their original prose.
"They're like cockroaches," McKee says. "Ideas are our assets, and it's frustrating when people take them from you without shame."
Other examples abound. WiserAdvisor.com, a sort of Yellow Pages for financial advisers, posts articles of advice to attract traffic. One recent article was about Social Security issues that arise when married couples are not close in age. The byline on the article is Michael Bischoff, a certified public accountant with Webb Financial Group in Bloomington, Minn. However, the identical article appeared Aug. 15 on the website MarketWatch by reporter Andrea Coombes.
Bischoff said Coombes interviewed and quoted him, and he had e-mailed the MarketWatch story to WiserAdvisor. He said he did not know why he was given a byline. Tom Murcko, CEO of WiserAdvisor publisher WebFinance, said the site requires financial advisers to submit original material only.
"We are certain this was an honest mistake on (Bischoff's) part," Murcko said. Last week, WiserAdvisor removed all seven articles that Bischoff has submitted and invited him to resubmit any that he wrote.
Murcko says his company takes intellectual property seriously and is itself frequently the victim of Internet plagiarism. So is NewsFactor Network, but no one has the resources to do anything about it, says David Geller, president of the Internet magazine.
It started here ...
A July 3 column written for BusinessWeek by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and his wife, Suzy, was posted on the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) site from New Delhi. There was no attribution to either BusinessWeek or the Welches, only a photo that appeared with the column of professor Arindam Chaudhuri, a business guru and best-selling author in India who works for IIPM.
When USA TODAY tried to contact Chaudhuri by e-mail on July 21, the e-mail was forwarded to Naveen Chamoli, dean of IIPM's Centre for Planning and Entrepreneurship. Chamoli e-mailed back saying that Chaudhuri was traveling, inaccessible and had nothing to do with the Welch column being posted beneath his photo.
Chamoli said in his e-mail that IIPM has rights to the Welch column through the New York Times News Service/Syndicate. Chamoli said in a subsequent e-mail that a Welch byline was added after the USA TODAY inquiry because, "others could be confused."
Jack and Suzy Welch, on vacation, had no comment.
In some quarters, plagiarism remains a serious offense. But where it involves the Internet, an acceptance of plagiarism is taking hold, and when confronted, offenders often shrug it off as hardly newsworthy.
Pew Research two weeks ago said it found that of the 12 million adults who blog, 44% say they have taken songs, text or images and "remixed" them into their own artistic creation.
A new twist is software used by spammers to automatically and intentionally grab original content to post on blogs and Internet sites. Authors are byproduct victims of an attempt to draw traffic to the content so that readers will click on deceiving links that take them to advertising.
Legalities next?
It's going to take a high-profile legal case to slow it down, says Howard Kaushansky, president of Umbria, which companies hire to monitor the Internet and report back what is being said about them and competitors.
McKee's BusinessWeek.com column shows how Internet plagiarism takes a winding road. It was first picked up by CRM Daily, a Web-based publisher owned by NewsFactor Network, which has a contract with a syndicate to post BusinessWeek.com content.
The attribution CRM Daily gave BusinessWeek.com was at the bottom and in smaller print, and McKee was not mentioned as the author. Other blogs then picked up the content from CRM Daily. Some mistakenly attributed the original work to CRM Daily, some attributed it to no one. At least four blogs attributed McKee's words to Jim Berkowitz, who writes a blog called CRMMastery.com. Berkowitz says he picked up McKee's column from CRM Daily, and mistakenly gave CRM Daily credit. Then, when other bloggers lifted it from CRMMastery, they mistakenly attributed Berkowitz as the author because his blog is where they found it.
"People are incredibly sloppy," says Berkowitz, who says he publishes a lot of content that he takes from elsewhere but identifies what is not his original work by indenting it and highlighting it in yellow.
"It's like the Wild West out there," Berkowitz says.
