Dealing with Plagiarism on Medium
I wrote a blog post on my second Medium account, and about two weeks later someone lifted the content almost word-for-word. They removed the description, used their own name (of course), and removed the part at the bottom of my post that contained information about my “brand”…but then I noticed something interesting. They changed almost every sentence, but only slightly.
Sometimes, their rewording was incorrect. I had direct quotes that they modified, meaning they turned them into incorrect quotes, and they changed my sentence that “software is BROAD” to the incorrect translation that “BROAD is a term that can be used to describe a piece of software.” I also had a joke about how you can attempt to “indeed-easy-apply your way to success.” They were apparently not familiar with Indeed.com, so they translated this to, “try to apply for jobs that are indeed easy to find.” They changed the entire thing to italics for some reason, they removed all of my citations, and they replaced a cited photo I found on Unsplash with a similar one with no citation. They tagged it under “startup,” and I do not know why. Nothing in the article mentioned startups.
I think you know where this story is going. I left them a little note:
They, of course, apologized profusely and explained that they honestly thought this made it their content. They took the post down, I was understanding, and we ended up mentoring each other and becoming best friends.
Ugh. If only!
Plagiarism is a Big Problem on Medium
My favorite article on Medium’s content theft problem is Medium Has a Major Plagiarism Problem, by Jeff Barton. Barton found hundreds of plagiarized articles that were making money behind Medium’s paywall, and suspects that many of Medium’s articles are plagiarized every day.
I think Medium presents an interesting situation for the following reasons:
- Anyone can write a Medium article, and it is perfectly within the Medium Community Guidelines to have multiple accounts. It is very easy to write poor content, not include citations, or blatantly steal from another blog…including from Medium itself. Abusers can then simply create new accounts
- Any Medium member can create a Medium publication — it is not like all Medium publication owners are official employees. As Barton notes, this provides an incentive to pass along stolen content
- Content behind a Medium paywall…um…pays. At best, Medium is a website that provides anyone with enough talent and determination to make money without having to go through a rigorous hiring process. At worst, Medium is a website that provides anyone with enough immorality and gall to make money without having to go through a rigorous publishing process
Another one of my favorite articles on the subject is by Kevin Webber. After writing a Medium post that was lifted word-for-word in a published print book, he wrote:
Since publishing the article in 2014, my article on Medium has become one of the more referenced articles on the topic of reactive programming, an emerging style of developing software. Unfortunately, rather than use my ideas to inspire original thoughts of their own, the two authors above have decided to blatantly lift the text of my article into their book for profit. This is not fair use. The theft of work originally published for free and sold for profit is the antithesis of the open source movement.
— -Source
We are supposed to be all about open source, right? When I started “publishing” some short stories as markdown files on Github, someone jokingly asked me how I would license it. I said that I would just put a little description that read, “If you reproduce this content without my permission, I will be sad.”
Now that it has happened to me, however, I am very sad.
Webber’s article, though well-written, is apparently out of date. Medium has updated their Terms of Service, so putting content on it gives you some degree of ownership.
The YouTube Incident
I have no idea who this Medium content thief was, but I have no doubt that it was plagiarism. He changed words around, but from one source he did not cite — a third grade schoolteacher would fail him for that. He even reworded parts of the post that were anecdotal, which technically also makes him a liar.
But he got one clap for it and no comments. For all I know, he is either a naive student unclear on proper citations, or some sort of computer genius who has 10,000 Medium accounts extracting cash from all over the world. I may never know who he is or why he did it.
But there is a fairly popular YouTube channel focused on coding/tech, and it has more than 100,000 subscribers, its own merchandise, and a woman at the center who apparently has a good reputation in software engineering and a very loyal fanbase. She made a video with the exact same name as my article, then spent maybe half of it more or less reading off four bulleted points I had. She even reused the same phrases and metaphor I had.
Another YouTube channel did something similar, for a tech podcast, but they cited me. I was not mad, I was happy…they even named the Medium account in their episode and apologized for mispronouncing my “name” (not my real name, a pen name I made up as a half-assed reference to Infinity Train). This was different. She included no mention of my article or the discussions it spawned on Reddit or HackerNews.
I wrote her a couple of emails asking to at least be cited in the description. She did not respond. A friend and I commented on the video, and those comments were apparently deleted. I decided to ask for advice on r/blogging, because that is what people do when they need life advice.
I cannot rightfully ask for advice, then get angry when advice I receive is particularly blunt…it is sort of like asking all of my friends for advice, then getting mad at them for giving me advice. I think it is annoying when friends and family provide me with unsolicited advice, but that is a completely different blog topic.
That being said, this one irked me. So she just so happened to name the video the exact same thing and then make the same points with the same phrases? Sure dude.
I appreciated this comment much more, yet it was essentially arguing the exact same thing — that this was a difficult situation. She did not read the article word-for-word, she included part of it in her video and even added some of her own commentary to that. Was it unethical? Well sure, one could make that argument. She probably should have provided a link for it even if it just inspired her. That she apparently deleted my comment asking her to cite it added salt to the wound.
This third comment was a little different, but kind of cool — I actually heard from TechInGaming! I do not really know anything about his viral article (the only thing I had heard about that video game was stuff I read in Forbes. Personally, I sometimes still run 1990s video games), but he had his own little twist. Try to move on. Content will be stolen. You (my words, not his) should probably just focus on continuing to produce content, if it makes you happy. Incidents like this occur, and they suck, but that’s life.
Finally, within a few hours of asking about it on Reddit, she updated her description to include my article. She also included the Quora post it referenced, the HackerNews Discussion, a related discussion on Reddit, and…yes…the stolen Medium post. Was I satisfied? Not really, because she did not acknowledge me and also prefaced the articles with “other AWESOME content on the topic” instead of writing that they were sources. That being said, I got what I wanted and am not sure if she would give me much more. In my mind this at least acknowledges that she read my article, otherwise I imagine she probably would have responded to my messages.
Closing Thoughts
I had an 8th grade writing teacher who failed students when they improperly cited their sources — he even failed a paper, if I remember correctly, because it just contained a list of URLs (he let them redo it, though). Sometimes I thought English teachers were pedantic…one, for example, almost gave me a D- because I used a “works cited” section instead of footnotes.
But this is the other side of the spectrum. Without any sort of accountability, people can just lift content. Sometimes, as was the case with the technical content on reactivity, people even take free content without citing it and then turn around to profit from it.
Just in the world of cyberspace, though, we have some bigger problems.
I am part of Kiwanis, a community service organization dedicated to helping children. One of our division’s domains expired, so it was purchased and replaced with a website soliciting prostitution. Their hope was apparently to force this Kiwanis club to buy it back.
Our own site is queried fairly regularly by spam bots. This really went down after I added a honeypot, but to get the rest I added my own form of identification. This is absolutely not something to brag about, or admit to a potential employer, but my method was to add a question asking the user if they are a bot. I have yet to meet a Wordpress robot smart enough to check “no.”
This is very helpful, as numerous spam bots have claimed they want to sue us for copyright infringement. They say our photos are in violation, then attempt to make us click a link to some sort of malware.
I guess what I mean to say is that blogging is tough (well, it can be. This particularly post was very easy to write), but the consequences of a really convenient technology are that there are going to be problems. It is social. If it is really easy to publish things, it is also very easy to publish stolen things.
And with that, I will now steal three of the tags Barton used and two of my own. Happy blogging, everyone.
