At least not when it’s flat-out plagiarism.

plagiarism: the act of appropriating the literary composition of another author, or excerpts, ideas, or passages therefrom, and passing the material off as one’s own creation. (Via UCB Libraries web site).

It has recently come to our attention that a startling number of our posts are being repurposed in their entirety for use on a series of web sites, all of which seem to be controlled by the same person. The posts are often republished with a very discreet link to the original VL post, one that the typical reader would perhaps not notice.

We probably would have let that one slide — it would not have been the first time. But I also found that a post that I wrote for another blog I maintain was used in its entirety with no credit given at all. Straight-out plagiarism. This compelled me to look deeper into the site to find, to my surprise, that the site in question is not only plagiarizing content from that blog, but VL content (what a coincidence) and…our company information as well! Yes, they’ve even copied our “About” statement — I should know; I, along with Mala, wrote it:

Brown Pride is a daily publication developed by ublog, featuring all the latest in Latino style, products, entertainment, culture, and politics created for the diverse and influential Latino and Latina community in the U.S.

Look familiar? It should. It’s located to the right of this post. The only thing they changed was the company name.

Are we being uptight? No. Just because we operate under a Creative Commons license does not mean that anyone has the right to lift our content — much less corporate messaging — and use it on their site without citing us. First off, if you read the CC agreement, you’ll find that if one does not cite the source of the information and intends to use it for commercial purposes (AdSense!), they are in direct violation of said agreement.

What really gets us riled up here is that we are extremely tedious about citing our sources. You’ll note that when I quoted the definition for plagiarism, I linked to the place where I found the definition. Not to mention the work that Mala and I do on a daily basis to keep our readers informed. We care about what we write and give credit where credit is due, so yes, it pisses us off to see that others — particularly Latino blogs — are not doing the same. That doesn’t sound like “brown pride” at all to me.

To our copycat friends: we know that the Latino market is booming, more Latinos are on the web and that having Latino content on your site will make you some AdSense dollars. If that’s your motivation (it happens to not be ours), here’s a novel idea: create your own content. I know, I know, it’s time-consuming, but you know what? It’s totally gratifying as well.

In the end, this is no unsolved mystery. We know who’s behind this and we don’t plan to let up should this continue. Though hopefully by the time you read this the plagiarized content will be removed.

As for those who legitimately cite us, link to us, mention us and read us, we thank you for respecting our work and making VL a part of your day.

For more about online plagiarism, visit Plagiarism Today