A Case Of VoIP Blog Plagiarism

One of the problems I’ve dealt with since back in the days where phoneboy.com was a resource for information on Check Point FireWall-1 is plagiarism. My content was appearing in places I didn’t authorize it to be without due credit given to me. Really didn’t like it then, and I’m certainly not a fan of it now.

I could feel for Tom Keating when he reported someone was stealing his articles. What was strange was that these “stolen” articles were appearing on a well-respected VoIP blog: Solomon’s VoIP World, written by Solomon Ige. The articles weren’t outright copies but “wordsmithed” to be different. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the articles were direct copies, however.

It turned out to be someone ghost-writing for Solomon that was doing the plagiarizing, at least that’s what Solomon is saying. Solomon apologized profusely in the comments to Tom Keating’s post. The plagiarized articles have since been removed from Solomon’s VoIP World, the guilty parties were fired, and Tom and Solomon have kissed and made up. A happy ending, or as happy as it can get under the circumstances.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of this “plagiarism” going on where we can’t track down the responsible parties. Unfortunately, something that makes it very useful for you readers–full RSS feeds–also makes it easier for the lowlife, scumbag spam bloggers to steal content. It was a debate that was happening with the editors at Creative Weblogging as well.

Not really sure what we can do about this problem. Any ideas?