I know I’ve been a bit quiet over the past few weeks, since the whole plagiarism thing. Part of it has been to do with dealing with the various related tasks; but the other part has been due to putting some progress between my laziness/lack of interest and some fairly important admin tasks. I’ve been - as always - battling the incoming email pile, which I am happy to say had some good news which I’ll be posting in October when I’m back on School of Puppetry duty.

Whilst on that subject, two things to note: SOP has seen a significant increase in hits, despite me not updating the site for a couple of weeks. Interestingly, this smooths out my usual weekend drop in stats which correlates with my weekend drop in posts. This encourages me because I had an aim when I started migrating content that SOP would only be updated once or twice a week, and I was worried that stats would take a dive. However, this shows me that at the very least I can improve stats without necessarily adding more content.

The second issue is that the break has allowed me some serious thought on the progress of SOP. While reading all the eHow articles on puppetry, I realised just how little info there is aimed at the professional puppeteer. To that end, I’m developing ideas on pay-per-download booklets on various topics that are more for the advanced person: ie. copyrights, funding, scriptwriting, etc. You’ll find a poll where you can vote/add suggestions on the SOP Facebook page.

But back to Puppets in Melbourne: I had hoped to have a few things done by this point. I had been working on some developments for the new puppet designs, but got heavily sidetracked by the plagiarism stuff. I’d solved the issue of magnetics for the decoration/puppets, but got snagged trying to order a sample because their online shopping cart system borked at using paypal. The good news though is that if what I order works the way I think it will, it should be a relatively cheap and simple solution for making plastic puppets magnetic without worrying about glues. The same concept should also work for making the puppets attach to suction cups for window decorations.

The other thing that I’d been working on is some ideas for market/stall layout designs, since that will influence what I’ll need to be planning for in the future. I’ve made a couple of miniature set designs but am still working my way through the third design which is the most complicated, but also the one I’m most likely going to use.

In the meantime, I finished up something a bit random. I had been making a template for a blog - mainly for fun - and finished it this week. It’s a parallax web design, with pretty moving stars. And it’s for b2evolution, a blog platform that I use. I’ve made it available for free (paying the kindness forward, since b2evo stuff is all free and over the years gotten an enormous amount of help from fellow users), and if you’re interested in using it for Blogger, or whatever, let me know and I’ll convert it for you; it’s extremely easy to convert and it’d be good to see it get some use. It’s my hope that on that page I’ll add some “portfolio” snapshots of my own web designs and Pockets Full of Fun. It’d be interesting to do a retrospective of all the different designs I’ve gone through over the years on this site…

The progress I’ve made is good, but not very easy to showcase on a blog, since it’s mostly administrative. But it’s nice to take a break from writing for a bit.

While I sit around waiting for eHow staff to comb through their website, I thought I’d post some info for those of you who do anything online that may be copyrighted and have discovered some plagiarism.

First off, calm down. The first thing I did was go into full-blown panic mode, which only stressed me out and certainly didn’t make anything easier/faster to resolve. You also don’t have to deal with it right now. I thought the faster I got on top of things, the better off I’d be, but honestly the only thing it did was force me to feel more of a victim and less like someone who can do something about it.

The second thing I did was READ. I knew about my rights, and I knew what policies I had listed on my site in regards to copyrights. I also knew what I did/didn’t do: I knew I had logos and watermarks on - most of - my photos. I’m still working through old photos, but since most are hosted on Flickr, if someone’s just hotlinking, that will take care of itself when I come to replacing the image with an updated one. I put copyright info all over my patterns/downloads, on my websites, and my videos. I use only royalty-free attribution music on my videos - and give attribution as requested - and only Creative Commons pics on Flickr that are for attribution/reworking/commercial use. So I knew what bases I had covered: but I didn’t know much about other people’s responsibilities. And so finding out this stuff helped calm me down.

In googling for info, I came across www.plagiarismtoday.com. This is not only worth bookmarking, but worth scouring with a dishcloth because there’s just so much useful info there. First thing to do is to read the articles under the menu ‘Stop Internet Plagiarism’. It has some really simple step-by-step things you can do to deal with any plagiarism already happening; as well as making plans for the future.

The following step - or really, the one that should come first - is to get hold of a good website analytics tracker. I don’t mean Google Analytics. The problem with Google’s tracker is that it doesn’t individualise hits/visitors, but aggregates them. This means it’s very hard to find a particular hit to your site; or a particular visitor. Fortunately for me, I’ve been a long-time user - even before Analytics came along - of Activemeter.com. (The activemeter site has a message saying the tracker no longer works; however I only noticed this when I started investigating the plagiarism a few weeks ago, and my activemeter account continues to work fine. The only reason I noticed their ‘closure’ is because I logged into my account with them using a different browser than normal)

Anyway, the benefit of a decent tracker like Activemeter is that I can indeed track individual hits/visitors. This means that I’ve been able to keep screenshot records of my website stat tracker; who visited, when and why. I have screenshot records that eHow staff (noted by their domain name listed in the IP address) have viewed my site, and screenshot records of eHow staff (same domain name/IP; or referral hits based on google searches that match titles of eHow articles, and the IPs match up with one or two different but regular ISP companies) using their own article titles to review competing websites.

Now this might not have any use at all, legally, but it does one thing: it makes me feel better. Instead of the previous inaction of eHow - not responding to comments/tweets and waiting for an email response - at least I know that they are taking things seriously and there is some sort of action going on behind the scenes.

And again - take it easy. It’s very tempting to sit on my stat tracker all day, but it’s frustrating. Login once or twice a day, open each log into a new tab/browser window, and screen shot them as you feel like it. (Don’t overload your browser though, as stat trackers often reset data after a while in order to keep your stats from weighing down their infrastructure) In this way you’re also not sitting over your computer freaking out about stats.

And if you don’t know anything about IPs, go learn. Another useful thing to do is to find out about how domain names work and how to do a DNS check. You can take the domain name and plug it into a DNS checker, which will show you who owns the domain name. Now for .com’s or similar, you can actually buy a privacy option so that your phone number/address aren’t listed as the owner. Sometimes though, people don’t use these or know about them, so you can find out who owns what domain name. Some domain names, like the .com.au’s are for businesses and are regulated in a way that the owner must have their contact info listed. (Businesses in Aus are registered with the government; you need a publically listed number for this registration; the number and contact info are searchable by law; .com.au’s also require this number; therefore contact info must be listed on the DNS check) It may not be useful depending on whether or not there is privacy for the owner, but it’s worth checking.

Plagiarism Today had a good tip that so far I’m not sure is all that useful - at least not yet. Using Fairshare, you can plug in your RSS feed’s URL and it will check any newly published content against other websites. In order to receive updates of these checks, you must then subscribe to a special RSS feed just for you. I haven’t received any reports of plagiarism so far, which is why I don’t know how effective this tool will be.

Next step was to open up a separate browser (I use Firefox, but I find that just having a non-regular browser like Chrome to be useful for this step) and go through eHow’s website. I ‘went down the rabbit hole’, in that I found a plagiarised article, bookmarked it in a special folder, used Plagiarism Today’s suggestion of Change Detection (to notate when/if the page is changed - already amazingly useful, as it’s alerted me to deletions of plagiarised articles and other things), and then followed the links on that page to various related posts. Now because eHow’s articles often have similar names and same content, I found it also necessary to bookmark the articles - even if they’re not related to me or my sites - so I knew if I’d been retracing my steps. It’s basically an online version of leaving breadcrumbs in order to find your way home. Because of this rabbit hole, I’ve found further articles that plagiarise, as well as familiarising myself with the layout and content of the offender. Whilst doing all of this, I’ve also been screenshotting any article that was plagiarised - and it’s important to name the file in a manner that includes the date of the screenshot - often doing it several times as a record of eHow deleting my comments or making other changes.

Because there’s always so much content on these farms, it’s a good idea to do a bit a day - and to install an Ad Blocker on your browser, as often Facebook plugins and other things overload your browser’s memory. I’ve not gone through all of eHow’s stuff yet; nor have I done searches on content which is puppetry-based but may not appear easily in the related posts (ie. bunraku). Obviously, it’s also a good idea to keep track of what you found when, and for that I’ve simply been updating my previous post with a date of edition and the link to the relevant article/s. Making the list available on my website is good too, because it means that eHow staff can check it at their leisure and see if I’ve made any further updates; certainly better than constantly emailing them every time I find something new.

You can do the stats/article scans a bit at a time and not stress yourself out, but there’s still other things you can do. A couple of people have mentioned using Copyscape, but I’ve used it in the past and found it extremely limiting. Copyscape allows you to insert a URL and it checks for copies of that page against the rest of the internet. Unsurprisingly it is a ‘free feature’ and though it may catch things, I’ve found one of Plagiarism Today’s other suggestions far better: Plagium. This not only allows you to check a URL directly, but also sections of text. But the cool thing is that even if you put in a URL, it shows you the content on that page and highlights any sections that are copied on other sites; a side-by-side comparison, along with the URL to the offending page. Using this site I uncovered a couple of other plagiarising sites - although nothing from eHow (because all of eHow’s articles are conveniently tweaked, which is where some of the plagiarism checks need to be human-based judgement calls). Plagium is free, up to a point, but you’d be checking hundreds of URLs before needing to pay. Even then, the payment options are the cost of a cup of coffee for adding in another thousand or so URLs that you can check.

The handy thing about this is that it reverses the options: before I was checking someone else’s content for plagiarism, which means you have to know where to look for it. Using Plagium I could check my own content and find matches. Since I can easily find every URL on my websites, it’s not hard to grab a link and put it into the Plagium checker and speed up the whole process.

Another option is finding images: Tineye. You can plug in a URL of an image or upload one from your computer, and the site will check the image against the rest of the internet. There are limitations: I plugged in a URL from a suspected eHow image - something I swear is copied from an Etsy seller, but I don’t know which one - but the site found nothing. The image was cropped I suspect, and so this perhaps limits how well the site finds other copies. Tineye also has a Firefox plugin, so if I see a pic I suspect whilst general browsing, I can right-click and Tineye will search it for me.

Something else that would have been useful is to sign up for an RSS feed or notification system for new content. eHow doesn’t use RSS uses RSS for individual categories on their site, but I didn’t realise it til now; I didn’t feel like signing up for Twitter/Facebook stuff - especially if I only wanted info about their puppetry stuff - but if you find a plagiarising blog, it’s a good idea to sign up for their feed. This way you can also track any new additions to their site; they may take down the offending page only to repost it later. Instead I used Google Alerts, but I haven’t found that very useful so far for picking up new content posted by eHow itself; only people commenting on eHow.

The next step is to make draft emails/letters from the ‘Stock Letters’ menu on Plagiarism Today. Now, being an Australian, I was suprised to learn that even the American DMCA (laws to prevent plagiarism on the internet, applicable to American corporations) applies to me. This means that eHow and similar websites have to take notice: even if the person running the website is in another country, it’s most likely they have an American web host, and the laws apply to the host as much as the person using the hosting. Even without that, sending a stock letter is likely to scare the average plagiarist. - Plagiarism Today also has some interesting articles on the types of people who plagiarise and their usual responses, so you can judge for yourself whether or not your own plagiarist will respond accordingly. Sending a couple of these may not get immediate action, but at least you’ll have done what’s probably the easiest step at notifying the offender and making sure you’ve attempted some kind of resolution.

– Indeed, one of my plagiarist’s has actually changed their site. Partly because they’re a ‘fellow’ puppeteer and probably got scared by my notification, but partly because I also removed a link to them on School of Puppetry because of the plagiarism and they most likely will want it reactivated as a result of the changes. (They have not emailed a reply since emailing them twice about it; but Change Detection has shown me that they have been editing their content to remove the plagiarised sections) Threatening someone, who is probably well-meaning, with action - lawyers, removal via force/web host, or denying link love - may actually work more than threatening big content farms.

By far, the best thing I did was to get informed. I didn’t just read up on plagiarism and what I could do about it. I also went investigating eHow. I checked out their policies; found contact info; tried to use their help system for info on reporting plagiarism (nada); and found out who the company behind the site is. Because many of these large sites are run by parent companies, if I can’t get it resolved directly with eHow, I have contact info, policy details and other things to make the next step: which is contacting the parent company. At the beginning I was frustrated because I couldn’t get any response, let alone knew what to do about the issue. I left it for a long time before now because of that. But the more info I had, the more I could see that there were many more options available to me than just sending an email. Don’t think that one attempt at resolution is enough: the more info you have the better. For instance, once researching eHow’s staff, I discovered a couple of Twitter accounts for their staff - tweeting CEOs has proven to resolve issues for disgruntled customers before - along with a couple of email accounts. If support emails/tickets take forever, then leaving comments via their Facebook page may actually spur more action along. I’ve found that the public attention can often force someone’s hand. – If you do go the public route, it’s ok to sound angry or annoyed, but you really need to temper your comments so that you don’t end up sounding like a jerk. I’m not sure whether or not I accomplished that…

Knowing all of these things, I can relax a bit more. Yes, much of the eHow content - and other websites that stole my work - is still there. Yes, I’ve still got more to check. I haven’t even begun looking at whether or not my videos have been stolen, or my images. Yes, eHow and the others haven’t replied to my emails. But now I have a plan in place to deal with it. I can go away from my computer without feeling guilty that I haven’t finished scouring for more plagiarism. I can get back to doing the things that this frustrating event had interrupted.

The last bit of advice comes directly from Plagiarism Today:

Make Peace with Defeat – While not really a technical tip, it’s an important notion regardless. While over 95% of plagiarism incidents can be resolved easily, some, especially international ones, can not. There’s no reason to bog yourself down on a handful of unsolvable cases while dozens of other incidents need to be addressed and your site needs updating. Sometimes the only practical thing that you can do is make peace and move on.

For some reason I remember it as “this distracts you, so deal with it efficiently and get back to what you were doing” or “don’t let it get in the way of your actual work"… I could have sworn I read something phrased more like that on the site, but I can’t seem to find it.