Yeah, there’s definitely an “If God didn’t intended us to plagiarize, He wouldn’t have allowed the invention of Copy & Paste!” attitude.

Coming from the same students who in high school would do their “keyboarding class” assignments in the library by typing it once, then C&P however many times they were told to type the practice letters strings or phrases. No wonder so many are thrilled they can type 30 wpm. That would have been a massive failing grade in my classes.

Thanks! I felt it was important to talk about here because so many of us here are women who blog, and there’s a whole notion that bloggers should not only be unpaid but also happy for people to steal from/heap more work on them, which totally overlaps with identical notions about women and labor.

Maria,

Ah, I was wondering about that, LOL.

I actually noticed the Zowie ones because of the trackbacks. Normally we get trackbacks from spammy sites, which I delete, but I noticed that this one had a “real” sounding name and was linking to one of our more popular articles (normally it’s the LOGI articles that get linked). So I clicked the link (on someone else’s computer, lol) and was like ?!?!. Honestly it was so weird I at first thought it was someone’s high school project.

Awesome and relevant to my interests, thanks. And great article, since I forgot to say that before.

Depressing. I don’t think that was really the case with either of these – every article on Zowie is copied, and they have now complied with my further request. Dave OTOH just removed all reference to and snippets from my article and replaced it with his own anti-feminist crap. Guess he was offended that a woman dared assert her rights rather than be flattered into submission by his stooping so low as to plagiarize her work. Benevolent sexism, anyone?

Sylvia Sybil,

Check your stats and see what phrases people are using to find your articles in search engines. Search those phrases in Google and start clicking the other results to see if any of them are copies. You can also Google your titles in quotes (“why beautiful women can’t get dates”).

And once in a while these people actually leave trackback pings with the offending article, which is hilarious. If you’re using blog software, those come up in your comments. I always check my trackbacks before approving them in case (a) they’re a copy or (b) they’re spam/porn/something offensive that would take my readers by unpleasant surprise if they clicked over.