Posted on December 20, 2009 by by scoop

Today, I got the surprise of my life when I thought I would search for some of my own articles on Goggle – only to find my EXACT article.  Word for Word, only with someone elses name on it!  The person who took it – ChrisinTurner on RiotACT.

My article titled, ‘Fight over parking space sends men to hospital – Canberra’ was posted on the 19th December on Typeboard.  The copy was posted on RiotACT on the 20th December, Google Results here. Now, I support content sharing as long as you mention where you got the content from just like all the news sources, bloggers and social media do, but this is just wrong.

During the past 6 months or so I have been adding articles to Typeboard.  In doing this I check a wide range of government and community sites for what’s been happening in our communities – and NO, RiotACT is not one of them.  RiotACT is a forum site based in Canberra and all of its content is moderated before it goes live.  That means they check if the content is relevant and appropriate to their audience and if it is original or not. I would understand if they were getting 20 or more articles per day, which would make it hard for anyone to check against plagiarism, but if they only post six to eight articles per day, I would have though that would have been easy enough for their content editors to google it.

I suggest RiotACT get their ‘act’ together and STOP PLAGIARISING other peoples work! and remove that editor or author from their forum. It’s just not ethical.

What’s your view and have you heard of worse cases?

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