How NOT to Plagiarize Chris Brogan

Lately, several websites have scraped my blog posts and repurposed my content as their own.  I know I’m not the only person whose blog is being plagiarized in this way.  But I wonder if authors like Chris Brogan, John Moore and Tim Ferriss realize it’s happening to them, too.

Say Hello to Joel Goldstein, Marketing Douchebag

Last week, Chris Brogan wrote The Audacity of Free, a blog post about the flaws in a “freemium” pricing system.  But if you went to Joel Goldstein’s website, you’d think Joel himself wrote that article.  That’s because he scrapes and reposts other people’s blog content as his own.  (In Joel’s defense, this particular post includes the disclaimer “Posts are pulled via RSS feed from writer’s blog.”  But since the name or website of the actual writer isn’t included, logic would lead a visitor to believe the “writer’s blog” being pulled from is Joel’s own.)

Likewise, Joel’s “Would You Miss Denny’s” think piece is really an uncredited scrape of John Moore’s long-running “Would You Miss [Brand Name]?” theme at Brand Autopsy.  And, unlike the Brogan post above, the Moore piece is reposted without a disclaimer referring to any other writer at all; it’s listed as having been written by “admin”.

But Wait, It Gets Better…

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time Joel Goldstein has been caught plagiarizing legitimate authors.  Last month, Ajit Verghese noted that the “About the Author” page from the website for Goldstein’s book A Professional’s Guide to Social Media steals not one but two testimonials originally written about Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek and attributes the sentiment to Goldstein instead.

At that same time, Peter Kim accused Goldstein of plagiarising one of David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog posts.  When confronted, Goldstein evidently took down the page on his site that used Armano’s work without attribution.  However, judging by the URL structure of that now-missing page, it matches the structure of the Brogan lift mentioned above, which means it was probably a page created by the same blog scraper.  If Goldstein truly doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong, as he asserted with Kim, he must also not believe that defending his position is worth the hassle.

Your Work Speaks for Itself

Chris Brogan, John Moore and Tim Ferriss are well-known and respected names in social media.  The relevance of their ideas and influence over thousands of readers is what makes their posts worth stealing.  They don’t have time to hunt down everyone who claims authorship of their ideas because they’re too busy doing actual work.  (Except possibly Ferriss, who’s probably too busy not doing work.  But I digress…)

On the other hand, Joel Goldstein (via his LinkedIn profile) claims to be a specialist in “social media, online branding and internet marketing” despite just joining Twitter in March of 2009 (unless you count his underused personal Twitter profile, which he launched in December of 2008).  Then there’s the matter of his chronically unwatched YouTube channel, and his business website that includes “viral videos” (yes, really) among his services.

Some people work hard to earn their reputations.  Others work hard to steal the reputations of those who’ve earned them.  For hacks like Goldstein to make a living by feasting on the grey areas that surround unlicensed attribution (or outright theft) of other people’s work is deplorable.  And for that, he makes our ever-growing list of Marketing Douchebags.

Tags: bullshit, Business, chrisbrogan, common sense, ethics, honesty, legal, marketing douchebags, Social Media