about plagarism

I was surprised and upset to read a blog post from another blog which looked exactly the same as one of my older posts. Exactly the same blog title, exactly the same sentence, exactly the same punctuation, exactly the same spacing. A cloned blog post.

I felt really really hurt that someone has copied my maiden creation without acknowledgement, word for word, punctuation by punctuation. Even the spacing and the paragraphing and the title. Even right down to the part where the lowercase was used on the blog title. Hey, that is the style I had created for my blog!

I would very much appreciate if the blog author could acknowledge me as the author and creator of that blog post and not use it and pass it off as his own works. Although I do not deny the fact that he might be feeling the exact same emotions that I went through. There are a few things that he could have and should have done. And here I would like to share with all of you.

Some learning points:

1. If he had wanted to use my maiden creation, he should have quoted the whole phrase by putting the phrase in "Quotation marks", acknowledge me as the author by writing "quoted from Idyllism" and put a hyperlink to my blog.

That is the way whenever you want to use a phrase or a sentence that you read somewhere, where you did not come up with the phrase yourself. It is only polite that you quote the original author everytime and always. This is to protect yourself. If you had copied from a website in which the author had registered a trademark or copyright, you would have infringed the copyright law and the person who owns the copyright can sue you.

Do not laugh because I had seen companies gone bankrupt after Streetdirectory.com sued them because ignorant web masters posted a copy of the map they happily downloaded from Streetdirectory.com on their company website.

2. He could have paraphrased the whole idea with his own words to express the same feeling. If it were paraphrased in anyway, it would not have been a clone. It would have become a totally different situation, just like twins can live merrily together. Something like a Coke vs Pepsi relationship or a Vitagen vs Yakult kind of relationship.

Just like when Rotiboy Bakeshoppe became famous, suddenly you discover somewhere in one corner springs a Roti-mom and another far corner springs a Roti-papa twin mushroom. When Bread Talk became famous, another that popped up was Cake History. Well, but the story is that they all live in harmony happily ever after.