How Big A Problem Is Blog Plagiarism?
I'm always surprised when I see some well known blogger flip out over the fact that spam blogs are copying their content. It's happened for many years — and happens to us all the time. Is it annoying? Absolutely. However, is it worth making a big stink over it?
Context & Ripple Effects
By late December 2005, splog-driven plagiarism had moved from background noise to a running grievance among prominent bloggers. The arc through the fall: a survey of the splogosphere's growth in October, Jason Calacanis accusing Creative-Weblogging of wholesale theft in November, and then two flare-ups in a single week — Steve Rubel on blog content theft and Om Malik's plagiarism alert on December 26.
Techdirt's piece pushes back against that wave, arguing the outrage is misallocated: copying has been routine for years, affects everyone, and isn't worth the fight. It lands just after Concurring Opinions asked what strongly enforced copyright law would do to the blogosphere, framing the practical question underneath the legal one.
First-order effects
- Well-known bloggers like Malik and Calacanis face a recurring cost of doing business — monitoring, complaining about, and chasing copied posts instead of publishing.
- Bloggers who follow Techdirt's advice save that enforcement effort by treating splog copies as an unavoidable tax on visibility rather than a crisis.
Second-order effects
- If outrage subsides, pressure shifts to blog platforms and search engines, whose index quality and ad ecosystems absorb the splogs' noise and monetization.
- The alternative path — legal enforcement — forces the blogosphere to test whether formal copyright claims fit a medium built on linking and quotation.
Third-order effects
- A pattern of tolerating splogs points toward technical filtering rather than litigation as the blogosphere's real defense, with platforms competing on their ability to separate original work from scraped duplicates.
- How this resolves shapes whether content ownership online settles into enforced legal rights or into reputation-and-distribution advantages for the creators being copied.
The trend: As splog scraping scales faster than anyone can sue it, the blogosphere's response is drifting from per-blogger outrage toward platform-level filtering and a rethinking of what copyright means for syndicated web content.