I just discovered that WordPress Arena has plagiarized my article on the hidden feeds in WordPress. My table was published here in 2009, appeared in the Hidden Gems presentation I did for OpenCamp Dallas last summer, and was published in Chapter 4 of Beginning WordPress 3 last June. The WordPress Arena version was apparently copied from the book sample (which is online), where the search term example is “apress,” the name of my publisher. The Arena article doesn’t show a publication date, but judging by the comments and tweets, it’s been up for about three months.
Screenshot, archived for posterity.
Hey, Nur: you’ve really pissed me off. I haven’t gone through the rest of your archives yet, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one you’ve ripped off.
ETA: Yep, there’s more:
Chip Bennett found this article on creating a child theme, ripped off from April Hodge Silver’s WordPress 3 Complete. The article does end with “[Source: WordPress 3 Complete]” — but April’s name does not appear, all the examples use Nur’s name, and I’m betting neither April nor Packt gave anyone permission for this reprint.
This troubleshooting article, posted in January, is taken from page 271 of the 2006 edition of WordPress Complete, by Hasin Hayder. Come on, Nur, you could have at least used a more up to date edition!
There’s a Facebook/Wix article cribbed from Website Magazine, an article on landing pages taken from page 93 of The Ultimate Web Marketing Guide, and I could go on, but at this point I suspect there is not a single original article on all of WordPress Arena.
… OK, I couldn’t resist. More:
WPTouch article taken from WordPress Top Plugins
Video player article taken from WordPress for Dummies, page 187
Hosting article taken from Build a Website for Free, second edition, page 23 — this one’s not only copied, but has bad information! The book was not written for WordPress-specific hosting. This article talks about Google Sites, for crying out loud.
Intro to 26 great commercial themes taken from Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s intro to her chapter on free themes in WordPress for Dummies, second edition, page 357
… that’s every article from the January archives.
I had mentioned book and article in References and Resources
You linked to a review of the book. You did not mention that you copied the article from the book, nor that you were not the original author. See how it says “by Nur” under your headline? That implies that you wrote it. That’s a lie. It’s also copyright infringement.
Do you know what copyright is? Here’s a crash course. There’s a notice in the front of every book you copied from:
“All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.”
In case that wasn’t enough for you, there’s a copyright notice in the footer of this website, too. See the little © symbol? THAT’S WHAT THAT MEANS.
You did not get permission from me or from my publisher before you reprinted my work and called it your own. That means I can ask Google to remove your site from its search results, and I can ask Dynadot to take your site offline.
If you want to build the kind of site that reprints excerpts from people’s books, here’s how you do it. See how the introduction is written by someone from Sitepoint, and then each article that’s part of the book says it was written by Kevin Yank? That’s the correct way to do this. Also, they asked first.
Either take down your articles, or reformat them to give proper credit to the original authors. And in the future, ask permission first before posting something out of a book.