Ok, so I’m not going to sugar coat this – I am writing this post because some of the copy on our main site, Quirk.biz, has been plagiarised by DataPro, one of the largest players in the South African IT and communications space.
As a copywriter I appreciate just how much time and effort goes in to producing well-written web copy. While it may not always be poetry in motion it has to be informative, succinct and turn visitors into customers - which is not always an easy task.
That’s why I get a little hot under the collar (read pissed) when I see other companies taking content off one website and putting it onto their own.
As an established eMarketing agency we see this happening to our content and marketing initiatives quite often - which really is frustrating. But while the majority of these “content borrowers” do actually try quite hard to at least rephrase what’s been written, we do encounter something quite shocking every now and again.
Last week when we came across the DataPro's electronic marketing site, I began to get the feeling that I had read this copy somewhere before… a kind of déjà vu if you will.
So I went and did a little research and soon realised that it wasn’t déjà vu but that some of the copy was actually taken directly from Quirk.biz. For the most part it wasn’t even re-worded, but copied word for word (I had to laugh when I saw that even our bolding had been transferred across).
So last Friday, Janine gave the head of the Digital Division at DataPro a call and after checking out the situation she told us that the copywriter responsible for the content had already left the company and that it would be removed as soon as possible. We decided to play nice and give them a few days grace. Basically we told them that if the copy wasn’t down by Tuesday we would blog about it. Well its lunchtime on Tuesday and the offending content is still up, so here we are.
First let’s look at Quirk (top) vs. DataPro's (bottom) copy on Online Advertising:
Wow!
Now for Email Marketing:
Ay Caramba!
And lastly Viral Marketing:
Three things bother me here - firstly as far as copywriters are concerned plagiarism is the one thing you want to stay the hell away from. Not only is it unethical, but it demonstrates that you are incapable of original thought.
Secondly as any SEO copywriter will tell you, Google's duplicate content penalties are pretty frikkin harsh so while you may have no ethical problem with “borrowing” other’s content you should know that your rankings will suffer (which is why I was really surprised that a company that offers SEO services would do this).
And lastly – I didn’t spend hours writing the bloody stuff only for someone else to come along and think, “hmmm that’s what I kinda wanna say so… copy/paste”.
We see this time and time again in our industry and usually we have a little moan in the QuirkStation, but I think there comes a time when something actually needs to be said - I think it’s just getting a little too blatant. And I am pretty sure that we’re not the only ones who feel like this. Unoriginality is something that comes up quite a lot in the discussions about the SA blogosphere and we’re acting as a community to overcome that – why not do the same for plagiarism?
Bottom line – we as a community need to put an end to this kind of plagiarism and idea borrowing.
Rant over; I’d love to hear what you think about all of this…?
***
Update: DataPro took the offending content down within minutes of this post going live.
As big proponents of online reputation and crisis management we'd like to invite them to comment on this post in their defense. We love a good convo ;-)
Muti
You can learn more about the movement 
I think you should stop playing nice.
Posted by JP on 2007/09/25