Regular readers will know how often I bemoan plagiarism in the blogosphere and on social media.
It is quite simply a huge problem.
In fact, almost a week does not go by without seeing one of our stories – or someone else’s – copied in their entirety somewhere else, sometimes without even a link back to the source post.
There are those who feel being pro-Israel is good enough; kind of like belonging to a club which entitles you to take anything else from another card-carrying member.
We are all on the same side.
Who cares about attribution? You should be happy the message is getting out.
Don’t be so egotistical wanting credit.
These are just some of the kinds of statements I have heard in the past after complaining of this scourge.
We just witnessed a particularly brazen example which we could not let pass unnoticed.
Yesterday, this appeared in the Times of Israel blog section:
I won’t republish the entire thing – there are too many screenshots – but needless to say, the post is in fact an almost identical copy of this reader post by Alexandra Marcus, we published back in February.
After being notified of the plagiarism, the Times of Israel removed his post, prompting the plagiarizer to tweet the following:
Prompting Israellycool‘s Judge Dan to enlighten him:
In the meantime, our calls for him to apologize were met with a deafening silence, and him blocking us on Twitter. He later did apologize after realizing the jig was up, but seemingly only because he had been caught red-handed.
Meanwhile, the Times of Israel published an explanation as to why the post was taken down.
The blog post entitled “I support Israel because I am a liberal” has been removed from The Times of Israel Blogs. The post duplicated to a great extent a reader post called “I Support Israel….Because I Am A Liberal” that was published at Israellycool in February by Alexandra Markus.
The Times of Israel considers plagiarism to be an ethical violation of the highest order, and a breach of trust that we refuse to tolerate.
While I welcome the Times of Israel’s response, I implore them to improve their practices when it comes to vetting content on their blogging platform. I was hoping they had already learned their lesson on the dangers of allowing content to be published without exercising the appropriate level of due diligence.
As for anyone thinking of plagiarizing from us, just know you will feature here on Israellycool just like our friend in this post.
We put a lot of time, effort and thought into our posts. Without getting paid. The least people can do is not plagiarize from us!
