Plagiarism is NOT flattery

You know your website is gaining popularity when others start ripping it off. The other day, the webmaster of a relatively-new hockey card website sent an email inviting me to check out his site. I did, and found that one of his site's articles--though short--was plagiarized from an article I wrote back in July about the 2003-04 Topps C55 set.

Here's a screen shot of my article, with the content in question highlighted...


...and here's a screen shot of his article, highlighting the "borrowed content".


1. Retro-themed sets based on early 20th century design
Of course, when I use this sentence as my lead, I am talking about multiple sets, including Topps C55, Champ's and Alan & Ginther. The guy who copy-and-pasted was too lazy to change "sets" to "set", even though he is only talking about one set of cards. Of course, he was too lazy to write his own article in the first place.

2. The 2003-04 Topps C55 Hockey set was released in December of 2003.
OK, it's a boring sentence...but it's my boring sentence. Why would someone copy this?

3. ...were distributed with cigarettes during the 1911-12 season.
This was the tip-off to the rip-off. Normal people would say "sold with cigarettes" or "came in packs of cigarettes". Only a complete nerd like me would use the word "distributed" when talking about hockey cards.

4. ...featured line-art drawings of hockey players from the early 20th century.
In this sentence, I am discussing the original C55 set, which used line art drawings. The C55 set from 2003-04 uses photographs that are doctored to look like drawings. The person who copied my words failed to make this distinction, which makes his "article" a bit misleading.

5. 165 card set, (etc).
This also tipped me off, because I use dashes (-) instead of bullet points when listing out the breakdown of a set. This is more just factual stuff--number of short-prints, variants, etc.--but at least change the dashes to asterisks or the wording a little bit so that it does not say "I copied this from Puck Junk."

Coincidentally, the non-highlighted stuff in the paragraph is paraphrased, which still counts as plagiarism according to Dictionary.com.

I know that Puck Junk is not going to win me a Pulitzer Prizes anytime soon, but I work really hard to write content that is informative, entertaining and original. Sometimes, I spend several hours on an article. It really pisses me off that someone would rip one off like this, even if it is just 40 or 50 words. Try using 50 words from a popular song's lyrics in your own song, and see where that gets you.

Maybe I am overreacting and being a bit harsh...but it's a blog-eat-blog world out there.

UPDATE: (10/28) The webmaster of the site in question emailed me and apologized.