Blogduggery: Where Are You on the Plagiarism Spectrum?

So tell me my friends---what do you do when your articles are 'lifted' and the author didn't even bother adding your name, not even in the footnotes? You recognize your voice, yet there's no link to your article or your website, not even a shred of evidence you authored the article---and yet. And YET, their plagiarized article shoots up google rankings while your work can't be found with an Orion Starblast Astro Reflector Telescope! Oh the agony! Oh the humiliation when someone builds on your ideas with words you composed and metaphors you messed up, and patches together a better article than the wordy one you should have edited but couldn't 'cuz you were suffering ptsd; i.e.: long on words; short on memory. 

I don't write for money so why would it matter if someone put their name on my work if they reached more people than myself? Why would their BlogDuggery sneak under my skin like a subDermal earwig, only to be exorcised with a review of my Mission "to help people". Helping People is the way my family rolls all the way back to great-grandparents who said life was about serving others and they lived by their beliefs. By now, my ancestral patterned behavior is so deeply ingrained that nothing short of a narcissism overdose could change the course of my life. That's okay. The world needs more caretakers, not fewer and that wisdom comes from a woman who's read a library of books about people pleasing and nice girls and the trap of codependency. And notwithstanding my grandparent's altruistic mentality, my desire to alleviate other people's suffering stems from receiving help when I was an awful mess myself---before learning about mental illness, family systems, personality disorders and half-price Sara Lee pound cake at the day-old bake store. I'm still a mess. But I'm an educated chubby mess.

What is BlogDuggery? 

"BlogDuggery creates the appearance of authorship through intentional or unintentional appropriation of other people's ideas, words, and oftentimes crappy metaphors. Similar to  skullduggery, blogduggery insinuates trickery, dishonesty and deceitful behavior.

A caveat to the definition of BlogDuggery as a "failure of conscience", is the degree to which a suspect is suffering traumatic stress, thus interfering with prefontal executive brain functioning and the normal restraint of an unimpaired and healthy super-ego." ~excerpted from "How to Keep Your Blogging Friends as Allies" by CZBZ

The first time my work was plagiarized, it was a compliment because it meant something I had written was worthy of copy-and-paste. Recognition of my audacious attempts to write would have been lovely but when it didn't happen, I thought, "As long as the site helps people, what does my name matter?" I wasn't alarmed because I know how overwhelming it is when our lives become unmanageable and we search the Internet for answers. We find meaningful passages here and insightful excerpts there and copy people's quotes without attributions or links. I get it. I do. I have disorganized notes like that myself. So when a blogger omits my name, I contact the blogger via email and ask him or her to give me a little credit please and we can have coffee if ever they're in my city. I don't make a fuss because I have a keen eye for broad horizons, measuring situations by their relative irrelevance in the galactic scheme of everything temporal. If someone's traumatic experience was lessened by something I'd written, who cared if they remembered my name? I suppose it doesn't matter really. But for someone whose generosity was taken advantage of by an opportunistic narcissist well, this schmuck feels sad about blogging peers doing the same thing as rat bazturds. Why anyone who'd been abused, maligned, and mistreated, would feel entitled and justified to help themselves to other people's work, without even a thank you, baffles me.

I Am Guilty, Too 

A few weeks ago, I posted about an image I had copied from a cooking blog. (You can read about it Here and also a little bit Here.) I'm on the spectrum. The difference between my BlogDuggery and pathological BlogDuggery is in the credits, though. I added a link to her blog and her name which in my perspective, was free advertisement. She didn't see it that way and since the photograph was her property, not mine, I deleted it without argument. So far, all of my websites/blogs are educative, not for profit or business but that's still spurious justification for copying articles. So yea, I have copy-and-pasted articles; however, I have never lifted whole portions of anyone's work, pretending to have written the article myself. And I don't like the "sleight of hand" some sites are doing now, cherry-picking people's quotes off forums and blogs, expecting that person to feel guilty asking for recognition and so these "quotable" people don't receive validation while the site or blog or book gets credit (and even financial compensation). Maybe people who've been in narcissistic relationships are extra-sensitive to being 'used' but I can tell you that it sure makes me feel pissy and I'm an easy-going personality.

Somewhere in our desire to contribute to the good of the whole, caring and compassionate folks are being taken advantage of---all in the name of altruism.

Still, 'anonymous quote collections' and copy-and-pasted articles-with-attribution are not as worrisome as Patchwork Plagiarism, a fairly new phenomenon in our Information Age. This is happening in our blogging community and it's dangerous because of the effect it has on non-professional bloggers who might silence themselves rather than have their talents and creativity appropriated AGAIN. Everyone loses when one person chooses to disrespect a peer's hard work.

"In her poem, "A Time of Bold Action," Edna St. Vincent Millay evokes an image of the overwhelming amount of data to which we are exposed every day, " . . . facts . . .lie unquestioned/Uncombined." Information is ". . . daily spun, but there exists no loom/To weave it into fabric" (Todd 2004)."

"In this Information Age, students produce research projects by piecing together passages quoted verbatim and stitched together with a few introductory or transitional words. They assemble research as patchwork quilts rather than weaving a fabric of new knowledge." ~Patchwork Plagiarism 

Being Falsely Accused of Plagiarism

The truth is: I have been falsely charged of stealing intellectual property; i.e.: plagiarism. A shocking accusation to say the least since the allegations came from a woman considered to be a close friend and collaborator. After writing articles and sharing my ideas for our new website, she accused me of plagiarism, threatened me with a lawsuit, and proceeded to malign my character. Ever since then, I have shied away from writing poetry, fairy-tales, or any creative works she could even remotely perceive as her ideas (despite having written my 'stuff' on other websites before we even met). Her very scary and threatening emails insisted I had stolen her intellectual property and would be subject to legal reprimand if I dared write about Hansel and Gretel again. (The Brothers Grimm and Anderson might file a suit against fairy tale corruptions like my stories but I never heard from any of those guys or their publishers). The whole thing came down several years ago, maybe 2006-7 and it scared the bejeebers out of me.

I considered sending my dear friend a tin foil hat but decided against it 'cuz people would most likely believe her version of the truth, not mine. Some people are convincing story tellers. I'm uncomfortably realistic about my level of charisma, of which there is some but not enough to convince people I'm innocent, if that's NOT what they want to believe. And so our friendship tragedy continued, an intractable situation between accuser and schmuck played out over several years. She in her corner of cyberspace and me in the other, never writing anything that could in any conceivable way encroach on her designated turf and she never coming to her senses or contacting me again. Because we had a good-sized group of mutual friends, some believed me and some believed her and she got a lot of mileage out of calling me a plagiarist. (I also learned am learning that it's better to work with your wounded ego than engage in a she-said/she-said popularity charisma contest. She's not around anymore, which allows me to feel safe enough to write about about what happened.)

My experience being falsely accused of plagiarism, my recent encounter with the cooking blog image (guilty as charged), being threatened by a particular psychologist when her article was filed in our forum's resource section, and finding my work in an article stitched like a patchwork quilt, has heightened my awareness of the complexity of intellectual property, copyright law and plagiarism. However, with friends---with our blogging allies, plagiarism doesn't seem that complicated. Be Kind. Show Respect. Don't steal from your friends.

Yesterday, I was googling for articles about 'The Smear Campaign' since once again, your friendly schmuck is experiencing another round in the chicken coop because I can't get it through my thick-as-a-brick head, that some people enjoy destroying a good person's reputation. While I was reading a well-ranked article about the Distortion and Smear Campaign, certain passages sounded familiar. Sure enough, entire portions of my Chickens in Oz article had been lifted without attribution or credit. What really fowled up my mood was that the 'funny stuff', the personally odd and quirky stuff, is what was lifted...picking through my metaphors adding levity to an otherwise serious article. I am not in the least bit interested in legal action, nor would I send a bully threat the likes of which I've received. Still, it's my responsibility to stand up for the integrity of my work even if I was writing about barnyards. How hard would it be to add quotations marks and a link?

Keep our Community Healthy and Open

What disturbs me is that excellent writers have so much to offer other people in our efforts to educate the public about pathology. But when people steal their work and claim it as their own, people are naturally reluctant to share. Appropriating someone else's work without due respect, diminishes the quality of our community, potentially reducing the numbers of non-professional articles people like myself are willing to write. It's one thing to read a psychologist's psychoanalytic paper on the etiology of NPD and those articles are not only necessary but fundamental to understanding pathology; but for the majority of autodidacts (a fancy word for "self-taught"), we want REAL experiences. The Real Deal. The nitty-gritty down-and-hideous dysfunctional grind detailing sociopathic parents, pathological siblings, narcissistic bosses, and rat bazturd x-husbands.

 How Can I Stop Myself From Committing BlogDuggery?

1) Inform yourself about plagiarism. There's no excuse for ignorance: A Primer on Plagiarism

2) If you want to use an article, ask the blogger first. Post his or her article, quote, or excerpt later

2) Include the author's name and when available: a link to their site, books, and/or biography

3) Use quotation marks when posting cut-and-paste phrases or paragraphs in your article

4) Add a Resource section to your blog and list your sources 

5) If using a peer's ideas extensively, add a link to their blog on your sidebar. Don't feign innocence by pretending you've never heard of them when obviously, you have

6) SEE your fellow bloggers. Honor them. They care enough to make your life better

7) Acknowledge your fellow bloggers for trusting YOU enough to freely share their work

8) Plagiarism silences people who've been taken for granted. Restore their belief in a trustworthy world. Don't Steal Their Work

9) If your work was lifted, be kind when first contacting the "suspect". If they ignore your requests or refuse to remove your work from their site, then you might use a legal dictionary and write a nasty letter. Most of the time, people are extremely apologetic so don't go overboard punishing them

10) Never assume you know a co-collaborator you haven't met face-to-face  ;-P

A Educational Video by TED.com:

Resources & Notes

A Primer on Plagiarism

Autodidact is a word my good friend Caliban's Sister taught me. She's always teaching me words with three syllable or more. She's a conscientious credit-giver and she knows how it feels to be plagiarized. 

Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal by Stanley Fish. The New York Times. "Very young children do not distinguish between themselves and the world; they assume that everything belongs to them; only in time and through the conditioning of experience do they learn the distinction between mine and thine and so come to acquire the concept of stealing. The concept of plagiarism, however,  is learned in  more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a  few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him."

Wikipedia: Plagiarism "the use of the Latin word plagiarius (literally kidnapper), to denote someone stealing someone else's work, was pioneered by Roman poet Martial, who complained that another poet had "kidnapped his verses." This use of the word was introduced into English in 1601 by dramatist Ben Jonson, to describe as a plagiary someone guilty of literary theft."