Plagiarism on the Web
It just occurred to me that I could ask our site visitors to send e-mails to our distinguished plagiarizers 🙂
I have the habit of from time to time check key words and phrases to find out where our documents lie in the mass of similar documents on the Web. But this seemingly innocent habit from time to time brings some surprises. The other day for example I stumbled across the following group:
The Page of the Authentic “Shotokan” (Pagina del autentico “Shotokan”)
http://members.tripod.com/~karate_shotokan/
They are anything but authentic, they surely are crooked, they include 6 (of 9 articles they have, 66% are stolen) documents directly downloaded from our site and have had the author name modified to Darío Durá, the plagiarizer. He even copyrights, how low can you get… You can imagine the amount of work that is involved; there is, for example, one on Master Funakoshi’s Karate, that I translated from Swedish, and later I typed it in, there are at least some 14 or fifteen hours of intensive work there and the author is Darío Durá… Please send him all an angry e-mail (mail to the following address: [email protected]) asking him to change the author and link the document to our site https://shotokai.com or take it off. This will not be mail bombing because the amount of visitors and those that will write to him will not be too many, but enough to notice that he is not appreciated. It is crummy site but anyway.
I found at a certain moment a site in Italy, another “Shotokan” sports organization (they seem not to be very correct these so-called “Shotokan”) that had downloaded at least 20 of our images, all with the original names and no reference to the original site. Again a large amount of work just offhandedly taken from our site. They were conscious enough to rectify their mistake and now have linked the photos to our site too.
I have encountered four more examples, these are only the ones I have found, I imagine there is quite a few more hidden in the web shadows. I have always tried to be fair to the real authors, I have always included the original reference, whenever I haven’t had it I have left a notice asking for it from those that may know. Is that too hard to do? Give credit where credit is due. It almost sounds as the 21st Shoto Niju Kun rule, but few really follow it.
July 5th 1998