About a week ago, Ian Miller wrote a great blog entry debunking the existence of miniature giraffes and exposing a DirecTV marketing campaign. He figured out that a website marketing "Petite Lap Giraffes" with a real-time video feed was registered to Grey Global Group, a marketing firm. He also noticed a tiny giraffe in one of DirecTV's ads and surmised that they're probably launching a campaign with the little star. He also identified some stock photography that was used in the campaign.
According to Ian, LongIslandPress (Lets call them LIP) then proceeded to rip off his research and "break" the story on DirecTV's about-to-launch marketing campaign without giving him attribution. They posted their blog entry two days ago and have since removed it, but you can still find it on Google's Cache.
The way Ian handled the alleged rip was textbook and is an example of what to do when you get plagiarized. I've summarized the steps he took below:
- He posted a polite comment on the LIP blog and made sure he captured their original articles text so that he could track changes.
- 20 Minutes later he made note that LIP had edited their blog entry and recorded the changes.
- 90 minutes later he noticed another change that actually insulted him suggesting he was claiming credit unfairly.
- He took a screen shot of his comment awaiting moderation on the LIP blog.
- He then wrote a blog entry calling out Long Island Press and including all the above data. He pointed out that he broke the story, provided evidence of the plagiarism and evidence it was his story. The tone of his blog entry was civil and rational.
- Ian then posted his blog entry to Slashdot, a popular tech social media website.
- From Slashdot it went viral and appeared on Hacker News among other sites.
- All the while Ian was posting updates to his blog entry with additional research including what he had found in his server logs showing LIP had visited his site. His updates are clearly marked.
The result was that LIP has taken the article offline and Ian has proven himself as a solid researcher, a source of great blog entries and has a flood of new readers from the controversy. The whole episode cost him nothing but time. This is in my opinion the textbook way for a blogger without a legal team to handle plagiarism.
I'm not a lawyer so don't take this as gospel, but I'd add the following tips to avoid getting sued for libel:
- Make sure you only state facts in your blog entry and back them up with hard evidence.
- Keep the tone civil.
- Re-read your blog entry and delete all sarcasm and any conjecture that isn't backed up by evidence.
One final tip: An easy way to find out who is copying your blog entries is to look at referrers for each blog entry (the sites that sent you visitors) because often bloggers will leave in original links to your site when they cut and paste your content. You can also examine your logs for referring URL's that have the text "wp-admin" in the URL because that indicates someone clicked through to your site while they were in their blog's admin interface, probably while writing a blog entry. You can also google phrases that you used in your original blog entry about 24 hours after publishing it to see if anyone else has published those same phrases.
Happy blogging!
Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO.
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