There are many ways to look at writing when you wonder if any laws have been broken. As a writer, you should consider several things. The considerations when it comes to infringement include what the writing is for, how it is written, and more. There are also ethical guidelines that people should have of their own if they consider themselves a writer article rewriter.
What is the writing for? If you take an article and the content from an article and completely rewrite it, technically it is not stolen. Today, it is common for people to rewrite articles and use the information as web content. This is the biggest practice today with web writing. People take articles and completely rewrite them. This can be very frustrating for many writers, especially if it is their article.
Rewriting articles is a very controversial issue right now. The primary reason is because writers see their researched article that might have taken days or hours to complete paraphrased elsewhere. Rewriting an article takes minutes in comparison to how long the writer may have taken to do a rewrite. The problem remains that there is not a law about rewriting something as your own words, especially for content.
In addition, there are hundreds of websites regarding the same topic. Many sites related to the same products or services say almost the same thing. For example, if there are three primary characteristics about a DVD player that consumers should know about, the site will say this. All sites may phrase the same way or similar. It doesn’t mean the content is copied if the reference is made about a product with the same qualities. In addition, it cannot be proven.
Google does their best to regulate copied content online. There are problems with this system though. Google has spiders that crawl the websites and look for primary keywords. They also look for web pages that say the very same thing. If content of articles is copied or stolen, it must be verbatim. However, even if it is verbatim Google looks at it in a different way. First, the site with the most traffic or who has been established longer will win. This means that if a small company starting up on the web has had all of their content stolen from a writer and the content is now on a large upscale site, the fight will be almost impossible. When Google sees copied content on the web they will not index the page and it will not turn up in search results.
Copied content is difficult to fight if you are the smaller company. You can contact the business with the copied articles and hope they change their information. Most companies will work with you. If it does become a legal issue you will have to find a way to prove the articles were yours.
Article rewriting takes place all of the time. The primary reasons people do this is not for the benefit of users learning what the articles say but to provide SEO content on the site. The major purpose is to increase traffic on the website. Software also exists which allows you to put in an article and spin it. This spins the words into a completely different article using the same content.
If an article is rewritten and it actually states facts, it is not plagiarism. If the writing is academic it must provide sources used to write the article. This is not plagiarism also. If the article writing is journalism related and the article is not cited with the references it is considered plagiarism. Writers have been fired and lost their jobs due to the problems with this.
There are tools to help people identify online plagiarism. The problem is rising with people stealing website content and using it as their own. There is plagiarism detection software that can be used but they are usually limited to the capabilities. This type of software only finds copied content if it is copied verbatim.
Rewriting articles in their entirety is not an ethical practice. Many businesses will fire a journalist who practices this type of writing. However, the Internet today has forged rewriting or articles into a serious problem. This is not something that can be controlled either. The only time rewriting articles becomes a violation of copyright infringement is if the person has copied the article verbatim. If the article is sited as a resource or it is paraphrased using facts in the article, this is not a violation of any law. All you can say is that it is dishonest and unethical.