With more and more companies earning their living by publishing content online, there's a growing problem in regards to finding that content. The temptation to simply pick up and republish a piece that was found on another site can be overwhelming and plagiarism is starting to quickly run amok. It seems that I'm not the only one to notice this. Evan Roberts has a post this week over at Marketing Shift that notes the same problem.

From Evan's perspective...

Many respected blogs lift multiple paragraphs from blogs and news stories that can make up an nearly the entirety of the content, and even with a link, that's just wrong.

I agree with him. While I understand that the very nature of blogging requires that a blogger pick up enough of another post to be able to comment in context, it's not uncommon to see a blogger pulling enough of the original post to give no reason to even visit to read the rest of the post. That does no favors for the blogger or writer that took the time to put those thoughts together in the first place.

Evan also points to a similar discussion taking place over at Robert Scoble's blog. Scoble is currently doing battle with some scraper sites that seem to feel that his act of creating an RSS feed means that his content is free for the taking.

Says Scoble:

This is content theft and its not OK. If you are advocating this is OK you simply don't understand copyright law.

As someone that makes their living by writing, I couldn't agree more. As a practitioner of online reputation management, I find myself stopping by the blog search engines and the news search engines on a weekly basis to run a search for my own name. Sometimes I find another site linking to my articles, or commenting on something that I've said. That always sort of makes my day. Other times, I find AdSense splog sites that are simply republishing my RSS feed with a bazillion AdSense ads around it. While I'm not a huge fan of that idea, they are simply listing a brief snippet of my writing and linking back to me for the full read. Thus, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

But sometimes, I find an entire article of mine lifted and republished on another site. These sites seem to think that just because they've made up a bio for me and included a link back to Search Engine Guide that I'm going to be ok with it. Some of these sites have even had the nerve to email me to "congratulate" me for being worthy of having my content "republished" (umm...you mean stolen?) on their domains. As anything that I write for Search Engine Guide is under copy write, I find this to be absolutely astounding. Especially since I nearly always grant permission for a republish if someone takes the time to actually ASK.

That's not to say that I don't understand the temptation. Search Engine Guide puts out a lot of content on a daily basis and when you have one person primarily responsible for ALL of that content, it can get pretty exhausting. That said, I work pretty darn hard to find and recruit guest writers and to stay on top of their latest articles and submissions. In other words, you will not find a single "lifted" piece of content on Search Engine Guide because we will not publish anything that we don't have actual permission to publish.

That's probably a pretty good rule of thumb for any up and coming blogger or web site to live by. There's a reason that content is valuable. It's because it takes time and effort and skill to produce it. Just as you wouldn't walk into your competitors store in order to steal enough products to stock your own, you should never dream of stealing someone else's work to populate your own site.

Build your own network of guest writers, attract guest bloggers or contributors with whatever you have to offer in exchange, even raid actual article directories where people submit with the express purpose of having someone republish their content. But DO NOT STEAL.