28

Jul

A Quick and Easy Way to Write Website Content: Should It Even Be Legal?

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

For website publishers the most important part of their job is producing [quality] content for their website(s). I put ‘quality’ in brackets because many publishers, unfortunately, consider quality optional. Many others produce quality content for their websites by employing professional writers and researchers, or by writing on a subject about which they are personally passionate. But content, even poorly written content, can be time consuming (and expensive) to produce. And these days people are finding ever more creative ways of researching and generating their website content. One tool – Instant Article Ghostwriter (IAG) – forces us to ask the question, where does research end and copyright infringement and plagiarism begin?

There is no shortage of publishers who spend their time “scraping” content from quality websites and re-publishing it as their own. There may be more scrapers on the internet as there are legitimate writers. Unethical as it is, it’s an easy, cheap way to generate content. Fortunately, when scraped and re-published, content can often be easy to identify as “duplicate”…and search engines are getting better at identifying scrapers and discounting the values of their sites. Eventually we should be able to count scraping as yet another SEO loophole that has been closed by the search engines – but not yet. So, people continue to refine their scraping techniques, often taking smaller pieces of content from various sources and re-publishing it all as a mish-mash of less intelligible (lower quality) content on their own site.

Scraping entire articles and re-publishing it as your own is flat out plagiarism. There’s no question about that. But what about a single sentence? Is re-using a single sentence from a single source plagiarism? What about 100 single sentences from 100 sources. That is exactly the method of information collection that Instant Article Ghostwriter enables. IAG is, for some, just the evolution of scraping – a truly infuriating product. Meanwhile others argue that the concept is a great use of available technology, and should be credited for what it is – a cool tool.

Ultimately, it depends on the user. If you use IAG responsibly, it could be a great fact-finding tool that allows you to collect numerous tidbits of information on any subject. These tidbits can either be used as a guideline for further research or discarded. But they shouldn’t be used in their entirety, and simply re-published without citations.