I was about to submit one of the stories I wrote on DIY happy to digg.com and I noticed a duplicate submission.  I thought - "Oh cool, someone has already submitted my story!"  But upon closer inspection I found that they had actually copied my text, word for word, and posted it on their site as their own.

Furious, I started looking at what I could do.  I contacted their host (blogger) and told them about it, sending along a screenshot to prove it, I also contacted google's abuse team (who actually own blogger) to dispute his pagerank and maybe get him removed from the google index, and I wrote him a note that he should not be plagiarising my work.

I also learned the "plagiarism" is a weird word to spell, but I think i got it down.

The first thing is he copied my text, which is bad enough - but I would not have gone to the lengths I did if he had not also submitted his site to Digg (a popular tech-news site).  Ripping off my work is one thing, but then trying to get credit and recognition for it is quite another.

Here is a screenshot from his website (click for larger):

And here is the story on DIY happy (which is pretty cool):

Real Time 3D Flight Tracking with Google Earth.

You can see he not only stole the title, but he stole the entire last paragraph and the links and link text.

This sort of thing seems to happen all the time - it's way cool to copy someone else's stuff if you put quotes in it and link to your source - it's the way your site gets promoted.  But to steal the text without a mention of your source is way crappy.  Plagiarism is enough to get students kicked out of school, and it's enough to making me flaming pissed off.

Nothing has happened yet.  His story is still up - even with my comment on it calling it plagiarism and linking to the source.  We'll see what happens tomorrow morning though.

The whole thing reminded me of a web service where you can search for plagiarism of your content.  It's called Copyscape, and guess who is the only result for the website www.diyhappy.com?