Spot the Difference: Plagiarism or Coincidence? You Decide
Posted on Friday, November 2, 2007No doubt you’ll have been following the little soap opera over at Mulley’s place involving the theft of copyright material by Ace Internet Marketing.
Well, here’s a little game for you.
First I’ll show you an extract from an article on the Ace Internet Marketing site. Not the entire article, you understand, as that would be plagiarism. No, just a little snippet.
Then I’ll show you an article from another site, unconnected to Ace Internet Marketing, and you have to SPOT THE DIFFERENCE!!
Exciting isn’t the word for it.
Here we go.
| First up we have this, from Ace Internet Marketing: |
Then we have this from Cape Web Design: |
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Add Historical Product or Service data: Let’s say that you sell iron rolls. What’s the history of iron rolls? Creating a page outlining its history is quite appropriate. In fact, taking it a step further, creating pages that compare it to copper and other types of piping; what causes rust; how strong is iron; how valuable iron rolls really is; how long will iron last; and on and on and on will create a whole section of extremely valuable content to a Web site. |
Historical data. Let’s say that you sell steel pipes. What’s the history of steel pipes? Creating a page outlining its history is quite appropriate. In fact, taking it a step further, creating pages that compare steel to copper and other types of piping; what causes rust; how strong is steel; how valuable steel piping really is (how steel piping is used in almost every building, etc.); how long will steel last; and on and on and on will create a whole section of extremely valuable content to a Web site. |
Isn’t that just an incredible coincidence? I love the way the Ace uses words though: how valuable iron rolls really is. Is our children reading?
Oh, you don’t know the Ace? He used to be a member of parliament, or something like that, but now he runs a set of extremely questionable web sites of which I will write more in future posts.
And while I’m on a roll, so to speak, what’s with Iron rolls? This is copied written by someone who clearly never did a day’s hard work in his life and has no idea what a steel pipe might be. Or an iron roll, for that matter. You’d imagine Aidan could have thought of something that made sense. Copper pipes. Plastic pipes. Concrete pipes.
But no. The Ace decided it was going to be iron rolls. Dear God.
Let’s try another.
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Here’s our genius on copywriting: |
On the other hand, the Copywriting Information Centre has this to say on the subject: |
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One of the most important priorities of evey online business should be their copywriting. Online copywriting skills are a “must have” for anyone who is thinking about real success with their online business. It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing a product, a service, a network marketing opportunity, or if you’re an affiliate selling someone else’s products; you need to know a little bit about online copywriting. You don’t need to be an expert at it, but you should know some basics to help with constructing landing pages, content pages, or just simple ads for advertising. |
One of the most important priorities of evey online business should be their copywriting. Online copywriting skills are a “must have” for anyone who is thinking about real success with their online business. It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing a product, a service, a network marketing opportunity, or if you’re an affiliate selling someone else’s products; you need to know a little bit about online copywriting. You don’t need to be an expert at it, but you should know some basics to help with constructing landing pages, content pages, or just simple ads for advertising. |
Incredible! But the coincidences don’t stop there. Even the typos have somehow been reproduced: evey online business.
Aidan the Ace has great tips on beating writer’s block.
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Here’s his reassuring advice: |
Great minds think alike: the guys at the Copywriter’s Crucible have this to say: | |
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If you catch writer’s block then don’t panic, and just accept it as part of the ebb and flow of the creative process. You can’t expect to nail it in every sitting. Painters will go over areas of their greatest masterpieces repeatedly until they’re satisfied. Writers enjoy the same luxury. A blank screen is merely your canvas and you’re free to sharpen, mould and enhance to your heart’s content. Just sit down and start splashing words onto the screen and eventually your creative genius should kick in and do the rest. |
If you catch writer’s block then don’t panic, and just accept it as part of the ebb and flow of the creative process. You can’t expect to nail it in every sitting. Painters will go over areas of their greatest masterpieces repeatedly until they’re satisfied. Writers enjoy the same luxury. A blank screen is merely your canvas and you’re free to sharpen, mould and enhance to your heart’s content. Just sit down and start splashing words onto the screen and eventually your creative genius should kick in and do the rest. |
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It all reminds me of Borges’s classic story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.
God, isn’t the world just full of coincidences?
And bullshit.
Other links
Ace Internet Marketing Are a Bunch of Gobshites
How Not To Manage a Publicity Crisis
Stumble it!
November 2nd, 2007
Grand. So in future, I’ll just be streaming your content directly over to my new site: “Bock The Robbber” (with three Bs, no relation). That’s solved my writers’ block. Yay!
November 2nd, 2007
Why don’t you try Bob the Rocker?
November 2nd, 2007
I notice that Aidan from Ace’s profile in Technorati shows 95 “fans.” Hmm, odd that most of them joined the same day with spam nicknames like ‘wats995′ etc. Sad bastard.
November 2nd, 2007
Oh fucking nice one. Mulley needs to know this. Get on to him immediately.
November 3rd, 2007
Ironic that:
a) a piece from a site about copywrite should have its copywrite infringed
and
b) comment number 5 links to a piece where a portion of this post has been copied
November 3rd, 2007
Squid: on point a), can you clarify what the copyright infringement is?
November 3rd, 2007
[…] is reading through piles of crap to follow up on ACE […]
November 3rd, 2007
I was referring to how ACE copied a piece from the Copywrite information Centre, one of the examples given in your post.
November 3rd, 2007
Oh yeah. But they’re talking about copywriting, not copyright.
The whole thing is about copyright theft though. It seems much of Aidan’s site is lifted from other people’s work. Feel free to go through his pages and see if you can identify where he got his material from.
It’s like a little puzzle.
November 3rd, 2007
What’s with Affiliate Marketing Experts Info? They seem to have robots trawling for content (including yours Bock) which they aggregate for no reason–except to pad their site. Am I wrong? Is this more Ace bollix?
November 3rd, 2007
What?? The fuckin bastards. Deleted immediately and marked as spam.
Where’s Mulley when you need him? Probably out in the pub.
November 3rd, 2007
Aidan the total Splogger!
November 3rd, 2007
I would guess that the iron rolls are a product of some sort of automatic spam filter or Google duplicate detection avoidance software.
November 3rd, 2007
Ace Internet Marketing - content theft with a twist…
This is rather interesting. It is, of course, in relation to bloody Ace Internet Marketing, who I won’t stop droning on about.Anyway, what they seem to be doing is taking articles from elsewhere, and (possibly mechanically) replacing keywords with wor…
November 3rd, 2007
I don’t think it’s automatic. Remember, this is the guy who manually spammed Mulley’s site.
Anyway, he replaces both “pipes” and “piping” with “rolls”, so I’d say he did it by hand, probably without thinking. Hence “how valuable iron rolls really is”.
November 3rd, 2007
Looking at the above samples, it appears to be a process called either spinning or synonymizing. It is a process by which an article is scraped or otherwise copied and a program automatically swaps out certain key words for synonyms using a thesaurus.
Programs such as ArticleBot can do it but other applications have combined that functionality with RSS scrapers to make them even more powerful.
These sites are a copyright infringement as they are creating a derivative work based upon an original and can be shut down using various laws. I haven’t looked too deep into this specific case, but there are almost always solutions to bring these cases to a conclusion.
If you need any help, let me know.
November 4th, 2007
Nice work, Bock.
November 5th, 2007
Why do people think that they can lift anything they like online and put their name on it? Is it a result of the ease of access/ availability?
November 5th, 2007
It’s because they’re assholes who believe there’s a sucker born every minute. This particular jerk was too arrogant — and stupid — to realise he’d get caught eventually.
March 31st, 2008
[…] eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don’t shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize… Only be sure always to call it please, ‘research’”. — […]