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Yesterday was another fruitful one. I completed a draft for the second of three projects, did a complete overhaul of another project, and started preliminary work on a third. Oh, and I conducted an interview for an article in there somewhere.
Thanks to Meryl Evans for alerting me to this call for articles. As she said in her tweet to me, “Doing a Huffington?” Indeed, for while there isn’t direct mention of it, pay is most likely not happening. You’re able to repost to your own blog after it hits their site, and only if you include a link to the original source. Right. Great way to build their own traffic for free while you get to help them. No thanks. Need I remind anyone that professional writers shouldn’t even take these “offers” seriously? Good. Moving on.
At the same time I was getting that note from Meryl, I noticed someone asking for article spinners, which is a bit more disturbing to me. Let me give you the Wikipedia paraphrased version of what article spinning is – taking an article and rewriting it to create another article with a slightly different focus. And if you do this with automatic software, you might even get to avoid plagiarism and copyright infringement charges.
How does this differ from theft? In my opinion, it doesn’t. Not sure how the legal community would view it, especially given the copyright laws that apply quite well to the print world but don’t always translate adequately online. Yet that’s not what worries spinners. Nope. They’re more concerned with losing face with Google – search engine results pages are their Valhalla.
Here’s why serious writers should never consider article spinning:
It’s not your work. I don’t care how much you alter the content of the article, it’s still not your original work. It belongs to someone else. Period. Come up with your own ideas and write it in your own words. Don’t “borrow” from others.
It dilutes your brand. Imagine this – if you’d spent six weeks and 20 hours of research to write your article, the one that paid you $2 a word and got you in that coveted magazine, how happy would you be to see that content watered down and respun by some hack who got a few dollars total out of it? If a client sees this work alongside yours in a search result, is he automatically going to assume you were the originator, or will he assume you lifted the idea?
It kills your reputation as a serious writer. I don’t see serious editors lining up to hire article spinners. Who wants to work with someone who has rewritten other people’s ideas? Why would they risk copyright infringement or plagiarism charges?
It sucks for all involved. The only person making money off this practice is the person paying (and paying poorly) for the spinning. Why support someone who has no problem taking or expecting stolen work?
Do you think it’s theft? Why/why not?
Does anyone want to tackle how this might translate against current US copyright law?
Article spinning seems to be the Wheel of Fortune of (Bad) Internet Marketing and mill-type writers. Get several articles for the work of one (or none if you plagiarize). All you have to do is clean them up a little to get them to make sense. It's not something I want my name connected to.
Spinning is definitely theft (at least in the U.S.). Our copyright laws are pretty clear on the issue of derivative works. It's infringement if you don't have permission from the copyright holder of the original. Any time you take one article and spin it, it's a derivative work. Without permission, that makes it theft.
Where it gets really sketchy is when spinners pull multiple articles together. Technically they're still creative derivatives rather than using them as true sources, but it would likely come down to how much of each article was used. I can't imagine spinning would be effective pulling a paragraph from here and another from there though, which is probably why this style isn't well automated yet.
It's theft, and if people see it being done to their work, they need to take action.
Some will argue that it's simply "slanting" to different markets — but you "slant" your OWN work for markets. You don't take someone else's unsourced work or works and try to pass it off as your own.
That's why legit publications always want your source list — so they can fact check.
Wendy, that's because you're a professional. Professional writers don't touch what smells that badly. 🙂
Thank you, Jenn and D. I appreciate the clarification. I wasn't certain it was legally defensible. Glad to hear it is!
That's a scary thought on the spinning of several at once. That may be the only way around litigation. Too damn bad, too.
You're right, D. Writers do need to take action. If we vigorously defend our rights, we stand a better chance.
I don't know any real writers who would even be tempted to spin, but I have seen some supposedly professional writers (well, bloggers who claim to be professional writers) brag about how much they earn by doing "mash-ups," that aren't far removed from spinning. Mash-up a few of your own articles, sure, but not someone else's, and certainly not mine.
Damn right, Paula. Someone mashes up mine, I might have to do my own kind of mashing up.
No writer who is concerned about reputation would do this. At least, we can only hope. What makes me especially sad is that I see this attitude daily even outside the writing world. Maybe people have always been this way and I've been missing it, I don't know. But I frequently see people do the bare minimum of work and try to get away with it. Many times they succeed. Sure, you might be able to pull a paycheck that way, but I always want to ask why they are OK with living a life based on mediocrity. I would be embarrassed about myself. Ashamed, even. I certainly wouldn't want to brag about how much I could make living that way.
Ashley, it's exactly why I think content mills are so dangerous to a writer's career. Even if you come up with original articles, there are "writers" working for those places that simply spin other articles. That's not right.
I don't know why the comment came up with only my first initial. It's me–Devon– but "D" will do, I guess!
You're too cool for a full name, Devon. You're the Cher of the writing world. LOL
When I was first sending out feelers and trying to figure out the whole "freelance writing" thing, I did some writing for a content mill. I do want to emphasize that I NEVER spun or rewrote someone else's article. My work was done primarily from research, which was sourced, or from my own life experiences. I did find one of my pieces somewhere else on the web, with the holy heck spun out of it. What I really hated was that they had (for some reason) left my name attached to it, and it was barely legible since it had been clearly run through spinning software. I tried very hard to get the thing taken down, but no luck.