There’s a bit of a situation over at a Dosh Dosh right now, whereby the blogger, Maki, has been outright accused of plagiarism, and the whole thing has deteriorated into a bit of a mess, with comment and counter-comment, readers taking sides and a bit of flaming in the mix - just another normal day in internet land you might say.

From what I can see of it, SEOPosition accused Maki of ripping off an article, stealing his images and then ended the post with the rather unambiguous statement

Perhaps I’ll spend some time looking at other posts by him to see if he’s the actual creator of the stories on his site.

Which I interpret as an insinuation that other posts may contain stolen content.

Regular readers of this blog will know that Maki is a visitor, and whose blog I have read and linked to virtually since it’s inception and he is someone I would consider a friend, so sure I’m biased, but if I was to accept the accusations of theft at face value, I would also have to accept that Maki’s thought process ran something like this:

  1. Launch Dosh Dosh
  2. Spend hours, weeks, months researching and writing comprehensive articles on aspects of making money blogging.
  3. Spend an equally long time visiting other blogs, promoting on forums, building a reputation.
  4. Reach a point where the like of Darren Rowse and John Chow are regular readers and linkers, traffic is excellent and a solid reputation is becoming established.
  5. Throw it all away by ripping off an average article from a blog few have heard of, stealing images he could have made himself in minutes. Not all of the images though, just some of them.

My personal opinion on the likelihood of this happening can best be termed: “Yeah, right”. I mean, what would be the point?


I’m not going to re-hash all the various points made there, as you can read them by following the linked article above, but most of them are a little wobbly - ‘copied’ images are actually different (check out the PayPerPost screen grabs for example) and if you think that by expressing the opinion that Sponsored Reviews is a similar service to ReviewMe, someone is guilty of plagiarism, then you really need to get off the web before a blog scraper actually does steal your content, as it’ll probably cause a nervous breakdown.

Why am I even mentioning this? Because mud sticks.

This situation should not have gone public - it was originally discussed by email, until SEOPoint made their accusations public, and Maki had no choice but to also respond publicly. SEOPoint have apparently brought this to the attention of their lawyers, and personally, I wouldn’t have thought they should have made these accusations public until after the legal option had been explored fully, for a whole variety of reasons.

Now, someone’s first impression of the Dosh Dosh blog could be negative, should they encounter it via SEOPoint - had Maki not responded publicly, then you would most likely accept the accusatory article as fact. Even with the response, some readers will take the accusation at face value, without researching further, and consider Maki a content thief.

Brian from SEOPoint has since retracted some of his comments, like the one quoted above, to apparently focus on the size of the images being the key proof of theft, despite some images being different, and the others containing content that is unlikely to change from one week to the next, but the point for all of us to remember is that once written, it is virtually impossible to completely retract something on the internet - there is a real permanence to opinions stated on the web that we should all carefully remember whenever we hit ‘publish’. Mud sticks.

I am in no position to state unequivocally who is right or wrong in this issue, although I consider the chances of Maki stealing this article to be so low, for reasons outlined above, as to be negligible and that SEOPoint were wrong to make public accusations at this stage, when legal options are still apparently being considered.

But there are some key points for us all to learn from this:

  1. If you seriously think your content has been stolen, privately contact the blogger responsible and discuss the situation.
  2. If you are unsatisfied with the response, consider whether you really want to: a. Drop the issue, or: b. Take it further.
  3. If you want to take it further, get legal advice, but remember that the only real winners out of legal action are the lawyers, as you leave yourself open to losses too.
  4. If the lawyer says there’s no case, there’s a clue for you to drop it. If they say there IS a case, the last thing you need to do right now is publicise it on your blog. Personally, I wouldn’t throw the accusations around, until after I had a legal judgment in my favour. Even then, I’d think twice.
  5. Even if the other person IS stealing your content, firing off emotional accusations in a public forum (your blog) leaves you open to return action - see point 3.

I’m not sure what SEOPoint hoped to gain from making these accusations public - they have denied seeking the extra traffic that has resulted, so I cannot see what benefit they will obtain from this situation. Indeed, they have spoilt their own reputation in my eyes, and I suspect many others.

The simple fact is that the internet in general, and blogging in particular is derivative and incestuous, and there can be no copyright on ideas for posts, else 95% of bloggers may as well give up now. I have seen reviews of paid blogging sites before either of these two, and I will see them again. My own post on Social Networking sites is very derivative, despite every word being original- I wasn’t the first to write a post about them, I won’t be the last.

Unless someone has cut and pasted every word, hotlinked your images or stolen some watermarked photos, content theft is near impossible to prove without expensive legal action, and frankly, who wants that? To be honest, beyond perhaps a friendly inquiring email, you’re better off moving on and forgetting it. In my own humble opinion, what you should not do is fire off public accusations that you may later have to defend, and that will reflect as much upon your reputation as they do upon the blogger accused.

It’s a pretty sad situation, and I hope one that is resolved quickly and privately.