As part of my business, I allocate $xxx each month for purchasing memberships, ebooks and whatever else I want to keep tabs on. Just this morning I watched a video from a membership site that tells people to do the following: 1. Go to EZA or other directory. 2. Copy and paste article in text editor. 3. Simply rewrite each sentence. 4. Rinse and repeat. BTW, this person isn't in Russia or something. This person is in the USA. I've seen this same process in other places as well. Here's something interesting and extra to think about. If YouTube can get sued for having copyrighted material, even though it was submitted by a 3rd party that agreed to terms, could Ezinearticles and others be sued as well? Sadly, this has been the best thing on the site so far.
Sadly this happens pretty often. I certainly know that I've been approached a number of times with 'rewrite' projects. Most of these essentially would involve me being given articles ripped directly off other websites (including e-zines or just regular blogs), and being asked to rewrite them so that they are at least about 70-80% different. Quite frankly, I loathe such jobs, and avoid them at all costs. Lets be honest, you shouldn't have to hire a writer to help you reword articles; I'm sure pretty soon science will give us trained monkeys that can do it. End of the day, I'd like to think that in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. -Vish.
If you loathe those jobs, there's always the option of taking the moral high road and refusing them to spend time looking for better, legitimate writing work. And Jason, I wouldn't be surprised to see them sued eventually - I guess the question is what kind of outcome would we see? Would they be held accountable? I'd love to see something like this happen (not necessarily with ezine, but with any site like that hosting rewritten work) just so it would bring attention to the issue so people could stop playing dumb - not that they would of course.
Possession is 9/10th of the law. I read somewhere that EZA is going to start rejecting articles that are too close to another topic. Something about preventing the topics from being overcovered. Maybe they really mean that they're going to keep article spinners from stealing content and resubmitting it.
I have a way better method to generate some articles for everyone. 1] Look around you 2] Find some "thing" you're very familiar with 3] Write your thoughts and feelings about it 4] Think what other people would want to know of this "thing" you have written about and cover those 5] Organize what you wrote so far into an article or articles Let's say i chose my cat or my furniture or how my room is cluttered with books as the topic. There's enough stuff for articles around you - Look around.
This seems a dangerously unethical way to create content. I don't mind the idea of taking the structure of an article and using a similar structure in your own content -- for example, that'd be like looking at the chapter headings in another book and using a similar structure to write your own chapters -- but re-writing every sentence in each chapter? Whoa!
LOL this reminds me of a previous customer who wanted me to rewrite an ebook for him. He basically just wanted me to rewrite the titles and rephrase the sentences. Geez.
It's difficult to imagine why people think this sort of thing's acceptable. But it certainly accounts for the standard of some of the articles you find around online. These mostly belong to those people who are among the huge turnover of "here today gone tomorrow" internet marketers, i.e. they don't fulfil their purpose anyway, and neither do their "authors".
Oh mine, it's obviously a shame to copy, paste and rewrite... I'm absolutely against this act for sure!
So don't you ever wonder why attributing sources is the exception rather than the rule in this type of sites?
They are purely motivated by greed but they don't want to do the work. A travesty of the world we live in today.
It's sleazy for sure. But there is so much on the internet, it would be hard to keep up with it. However, if someone got the gumption to follow through, it could set a precedent.