What I do is read, study, and research. Just like Jenn said, ideas are not copyrighted, but words (and the unique expression of those words) are. First, when doing research, completely forget about article directories and use reputable sources-govenment organizations, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. What I do is read and study,and first get the research in my head. Then wait a bit before I start writing. That way, the 'expression" of the article and content is mine. You have to perform research, but you can't just take someone's article and rewrite it, that is plagiarism. Also, you should double check your article for similarities as well. You may be surprised to see that there are similarities even if you weren't rewriting an article. In my own personal opinion, if you find that you can't research a topic, and come up with your own creatively unique article, then you have no business writing in the first place. Not everyone is a writer-it is a gift that some have. I am a horrible speaker, but I am an excellent writer. You should never have to "rewrite" someone else's article if you have the "gift of writing".
I pay to have articles written and if I find that a writer has been rewriting existing content then I delete the work and I "fire" the writer. But... That varies depending on the country. (Sweden for example, has some pretty "interesting" copyright laws.) Which is why I try to use mostly U.S. writers. Fear of the law tends to keep them in line.
it is absolutely not ok to re-write articles. and if you think that you can get away with it then you are wrong, as most webhost will cancel your account and drop your website if you do so! and on ethical grounds, this is called cheating anyways, there is a "fair use" clause that will help you, if you don't plan to make money from those articles in any form, but then it all deponds on the judge if you are sued! Why don't you talk to the article directories owners, here are a few on dp, may be if they allow, and if they have editing rights of the articles, you can edit those, but then it won't help much as duplicate content is always duplicate content!
don't know about the website dropping but one thing's for sure - it ain't legal to do that kinda thing, alright!
It's not OK to take anything from anywhere. If you're not able to create unique content, then article writing is a waste of your time. Better hire someone. I don't take articles from these places, I don't even visit them. It's better to start your own content and write about things you know.
No it is definitely not OK to rewrite articles from directories. If you want to rewrite, use plr articles or have a writer create unique content for you. Talented writers spend valuable time researching and writing content. Let's say you have a j.o.b. and have done a lot of research and writing a proposal for a major project. Then your coworker decides to give your proposal to the boss and then takes all the credit. How would that make you feel?
If you kept the resource box and all the links intact then it would be ok. Some people do that to get around SE duplicate content filters. That's good. Article re-writing isn't worth it at all imo. Just not worth the time. Buying articles is a much better solution.
has anyone heard of anyone or a webmaster being sued for using articles in article directories? or a blogger going to prison? based on the replies, this seems like a grave matter. as suggested, i have hired a writer to do the articles for me. thanks for all the replies.
Here is a simple way to solve this... Example. You want to write about how to grow bonsai plant 1) Read a few articles on the subject you want to write about. 2) Read them 8-10x. 3) Now get a voice recorder. 4) Call up a friend and ask him to give you ten minutes. 5) Tell your friend how to he can grow a bonsai plant and record that. 6) Replay the recorded conversation 7) Now sit down and write that article - It is 100% original Only take 20 minutes
TheProfit Club , you really nailed that ,Reading from Article directories and other sources like Encyclopedia is called research.Coming up with an article based on those is what? I leave it to you guys..
Research is one thing -- lifting entire content is another thing. You can even refer to information on other sites as long as you give proper attribution. Without it you may be running into trouble.
having said that, there is a limit on how many ways you can bake a cookie, take for example CPR, every hospital on the planet uses CPR and every health book on the planet has how to do CPR to someone. you cant change the way to do CPR or the wording of how to do it that much. so all the hospitals that have published how to do CPR have stolen the copyright from someone, same with a how to bake a cookie. you cant copyright the symptoms of an Illness, you just cant change them no matter how you write them, they are the same as every other paper/page that has been written about that Illness plagiarism is taking one piece of work and changing a few words around and then claiming it to be yours. rehashing is plagiarism. plagiarism is not having 2-3 sentences that are in others work because there is only a few ways you can say some things, i.e. The papers written on medical issues will almost always have the same or very near same sentences as most other papers on an illness.
Yes - for this line of thinking would just help you come up with mere speculations without substantial facts! An innovative step towards writing real original content would be to fuse your own judgement with available facts. For instance, you could write down an article about Bird flu and come up with content that was produced through tantamous plagiarism, especially if you just include the facts already discussed by countless science journals, news articles, medical papers, etc. Now how do you come up with something original about Bird flu? Simple - theorize on the most probable cause of the virus' propagation to new carriers, particularly chickens in poultry farms! What would that be? Forest denudation! Why was there a Bird flu epidemic only within Southeast Asian territories? Simple - poultry farms in Southeast Asia don't have close to similar protective measures against outside elements, particularly other birds - Bird flu virus carriers (birds that always tend to search for potential breeding grounds because of habitat denudation, and wouldn't poultry farms, with its conducive bird-breeding environment, attract such Bird flu virus carriers? - as the poultry farms in Western territories where technological advances have been applied on existing poultry systems. Why did the virus mutate? Simple - wild birds aren't given or even exposed to an environment where synthetically produced vitamins, minerals, anti-biotics, pesticides, various chemicals, etc. are used each and every day. Why didn't people develop immunity to the virus? Simple - people feed on artificially grown food most of their lives, or at least they feed on chemically induced substances such as plants exposed to pesticides and animals given synthetically developed vitamins, etc.! How can this be applied on credit card schemes? Simple - if you have a credit card, the logical thing to assume would be that you would have experienced having a credit card, right? Otherwise, wouldn't you have personally driven yet logical suggestions for someone knee-deep in credit card debt? Of course, you just need to state your personal outlook about the subject at hand. Here's an analogy: topic: a woman with superhuman abilities source: A woman was given a tiny chunk of rock by an old wizard, and she's granted with superhuman abilities every time she swallows it. The wizard gave her the chunk of rock due to pity since her parents died because of ruthless criminals. The story unfolds as she battles the evil forces of the world. plagiarized: A woman is given a pair of armbands that gives her superhuman abilities every time she wears it. The alien beings gave her the armbands because they sensed goodness in her heart, and they want her to change the world for the better. The story unfolds as she does battle with the dark forces of the planet. original: A female archeologist discovers an ancient vest that supposedly provides its bearer with superhuman abilities. She discovered this mystery through particular events that involved her archeological ventures. She then finds out that the vest is somehow connected to her own ancestral roots. The story then unfolds as she tries to find the vest and discover the truth about her past. So, would you need to cite sources of information wherein the information can be found in countless materials that dates from the present and back to the 1700s? In this case, would not these citations compose at least 90% of the content you have produced if ever you plan to cite all sources of information on the particular subject at hand? Would not this be part of your own judgement in case you are well versed in a given subject? Wouldn't the main essence that makes you unique be capable of helping you come up with equally unique content about any given topic? But what if the essence that provides you with a unique perspective about a specific topic were just handed down by countless tools for information propagation? Would not your own experience play a vital role in your task of creating real original content? Would not this be the only aspect of your life that is actually unique? If this becomes your point of argument, then you can write down original content. Otherwise, it would be fine for you to "rewrite" materials that were actually "rewritten" right from the start! The law would prevent you to do just so, but your defense would be the great people in history who have come up with content that was practically "rewritten" as almost 90% of the content was already observed by other people through the physical laws of the universe. Your defense would then break down as you have both local and international laws to face. One advice for buyers of real original content who seek to purchase from proficient writers living in countries where copyright laws are virtually non-existent: draft a subcontract without existent loopholes regarding international copyright regulations, let the writers sign and be bounded by the subcontract, and explicitly state that all judiciary proceedings be held in the buyer's own country where copyright provisions apply. Not a foolproof solution, yes, since buyers wouldn't want to shoulder legal expenses whenever the writers do not adhere to the terms found in the signed subcontract, but this wouldn't just be intended for writers living in countries where copyright laws are non-existent since any writer could plagiarize and stay virtually unafraid of such copyright laws. But anyway, these buyers would have something substantial to defend themselves, right?
@ZeroInfinity After reading a long long post of your's I didn't find anything to object on! That's more than a best explanation. But her's a bit confusion. The adivce is logically true, but I think being logically true is not the complete criteria for something to be valid, it also needs to be practically applicable. I didn't mean to say that the advice is not practical applicable, it is, but don't you see that most of the buyers will not pain to draft such subcontract. For most of them the palgiarism thing is just limited to copyscape and some other checkers. More than three fourth of the content buyers associate palgiarism with words only and in such case the writers rewriting the content can claim that their product is 'original'. I, however, totally agree with your concept of original content. Regards,
Keep in mind that a book is a book and a web page is a web page. what you have to remember is that people buy a book because they want to read 300-500 pages of a book. A web page that is more than 2-3 scrolls is the most it should ever be, so you are trying to get the information across in less than 500 words at most, not 500 pages, 300 words being the norm. Copyright laws were for the most part, made for print and not the internet. Were before you had maybe 1 million writers being published each year with books, now with the WWW you have 50 million writers a day publishing at least one page a day if not more. All of them trying to cram a topic in a page of 300-500 words. which means no matter how you cut it, people are going to say/use the same sentences at some point, and when you have flood level on a topic, someone is going to claim that someone copied their work, when in fact they never even seen it, just because there is a limit on how many people can write about a topic in under 300-500 words.
Totally agree! I also agree with the 'limit' option. Actually anything that exists in physical form has some limits, and so is the case for words. What I mentioned in my previous post was the limited validity of practical application of a subcontract, which means that growing businesses and the involvement of 'content buyers' (the web content only) in many different projects doesn't allow them to get involved in any further contract thing when they are easily getting a Search Engine friendly content (which is the basic requirement for them) without such contract. Regards,
i think what i am trying to say is this: printed books may have had 1 million different books published a year by maybe 1 million different writers, i have no idea what the figures are. 50 million people have a blog and that figure is rising each day. if just 10% of them post a short entry on their blog every day, thats 5 million posts, and if you take a short entry on your personal thoughts on a topic, as being 50-100 words, as i think 50% are, then you'll have copyright claims and plagiarism claims, left right and center every day of the week. the copyright laws have to be updated to take into account the modern day users of the internet, and accept that with worldwide access to 1.5 billion people and rising, then the amount of people publishing there private thoughts on a website about a topic, has to reach a saturation point sooner or later. As each day passes, this will get worse, and no-one can be 100% safe from the present laws, as they do not take into account, present needs or demands.
We have personally slapped DMCA on websites that have illegally stolen or "rehashed" content from our site. If google gets a DMCA notice that is properly down and find it to be true your site could be banned from google as well as your adsense account suspended. I really wish more writers would do this... Right now the small websites get away with a lot. The larger websites know better and pay for good ORIGINAL writing. For large sites its not worth the risk.
Web content plagiarism is oftentimes limited to three-word copied phrases and above as well as the chronological order of information - probably the structural foundation of the online intentional and unintentional plagiarism checkers on the Internet. On the other hand, print plagiarism can be as vague as it can get. So if concepts can't be copyrighted, then I could just inject my own thoughts about old Al's work and claim my work as a newfangled outlook about the mathematical universe? Moreover, if I intend to publish my work online, wouldn't I just have to steer clear from using three-word phrases and above as well as the exact chronological order of concepts all found in old Al's work? Thus, would injecting my own experience and perception about the physically mathematical universe and combining it with old Al's work without using the same three-word phrases and above as well as the same chronological order of concepts found in old Al's work so as to come up with a book that I intend to publish online actually allow me to legally have an entirely original book as dictated by both international print and online copyright provisions? Would the now present definition of plagiarism that can be found on this thread functionally make those intentional and unintentional plagiarism checkers useless to some extent? Would not the buyers of content need to properly assess results from these online checkers and not just consider a write-up plagiarized just because the results spat out by these online checkers say so? Would not Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other SEs need to hire people with the task of manually checking each document published and submitted to these SEs before indexing the write-ups in order to identify plagiarized content? There is an almost infinite combination of experiences, perceptions, and physically observed facts about a single subject, so I don't think we'd be able to reach critical mass when it comes to original content - at least not yet, or more so, not until the universe attains saturation levels regarding expansion. A person's mind cannot probably be saturated with experiences, sensations, perceptions, and physical facts - all due to the fact that one's life is just way too short for this to happen. So anyone can still create original content until the day that the physical laws cease to govern the universe - which would probably be the time wherein the universe is again curled up in a ball with zero and infinite gravity, electricity, time, mass, and energy - the Singularity. Of course, it would again probably expand the same way it did at the time of the Big Bang as the particles contained within the Singularity would still be the same particles contained within the original Singularity, and the same particles placed in a same container with the same physical laws would logically act the same way as it always would. So if the same particles were to expand from the same Singularity, then wouldn't the expanding particles act the same way as it acted during the original expansion of the same Singularity? My point is - you'd then write the same content you always had, and this probably applies to everyone in general given the present mathematically logical circumstances. In the end, you're continuously copying your own work over and over again within a finite time frame that is contained within an infinite repitition of time as we all know it all. From me: "One advice for buyers of real original content who seek to purchase from proficient writers living in countries where copyright laws are virtually non-existent: draft a subcontract without existent loopholes regarding international copyright regulations, let the writers sign and be bounded by the subcontract, and explicitly state that all judiciary proceedings be held in the buyer's own country where copyright provisions apply. Not a foolproof solution, yes, since buyers wouldn't want to shoulder legal expenses whenever the writers do not adhere to the terms found in the signed subcontract, but this wouldn't just be intended for writers living in countries where copyright laws are non-existent since any writer could plagiarize and stay virtually unafraid of such copyright laws. But anyway, these buyers would have something substantial to defend themselves, right?" From Analyst: "The adivce is logically true, but I think being logically true is not the complete criteria for something to be valid, it also needs to be practically applicable. I didn't mean to say that the advice is not practical applicable, it is, but don't you see that most of the buyers will not pain to draft such subcontract." As you can see on the last three statements on my quoted post, I recognize the fact that most buyers would not want to go through such a process, but this should always be done wherever both the buyer and the writer are situated on the world in order for both parties to protect themselves at all times. If a buyer hired a writing firm for a small 1000+-word project and the copyright terms of the signed subcontract were vehemently broken by the firm, wouldn't the buyer press charges against the firm and subsequently finance the entire judiciary proceedings all because the buyer can sue the firm for more money than the value of the 1000+-word project? Wouldn't a freelance writer that was offered by a large international company a 1000+-word project also press charges in case it goes the other way around? Now would they be capable of pressing charges if there were no signed subcontracts to defend their claims? Thanks.