The president of an environmental organization plagiarized one of my articles
Besides Chinese and Japanese blogs, one of the most frequent groups that steal my content are environmental organizations, who try to hide behind their "noble" non-profit status and Fair Use. Never mind that the fair use clause of copyright law does not afford them the rights they think it does.:flare:
Yesterday, Copyscape's "CopySentry" service alerted me to yet another instance of intellectual theft by an environmental organization, only it wasn't a straight copying of one of my articles as is typical. Instead the president of the organization posted an editorial about mercury in fish and under a section of the editorial he titled "Why is mercury a problem?" he plagiarized a huge section of my article only occasionally swapping some words here and there to make it less obvious. Of the approximately 800 word section of the editorial, around 650 words were part of phrases that were lifted verbatim from my article. Now I might have let this slide, however, this individual then proceeded to promote his article and thus himself by publishing the editorial not only on his organizations own site, but on another environmental site, his MySpace web page and a MySpace forum thread started by one of his "friends" who opened the thread with the comment with "giving credit where credit is due" (of course the credit didn't go to my original article). In essence because of this case of blatant plagiarism, there are now at least four web pages that contain almost half the text of one of my articles.
Being that it was the president of the environmental organization that committed the plagiarism and not some low level administrative person, I'm quite certain getting this case of plagiarism addressed is going to be an up hill battle. The thing is, this isn't only about the theft my content, but the fact that the head of a well known environmental organization has committed intellectual fraud by claiming to have written something that he substantially plagiarized from elsewhere.
My first track to deal with this issue has been to write an editorial on my blog titled "Plagiarism, Copyright Infringement, Fair Use and Environmental Organizations". The purpose of this article is to help frame the larger issue (I plan to link to it from the footer of all my pages) of copyrights and plagiarism, as well provide a public warning the writer who plagiarized my article to either make amends or be prepared to have his plagiarism fully exposed to the light of day.
Besides blowing off a little steam, my intention in starting this thread is to ask for some help that I'm sure I'll need to gain substantial attention to the plagiarism this individual committed when they ignore my requests to correct the situation.
You can see for your self the exact extent of the plagiarism by feeding the URL of my article into Copyscape's search tool (the first four results are what you will be interested in).
--edit--
I forgot to provide the URL of the article that was plagiarized, which is: http://environmentalchemistry.com/yo...attyacids.html
