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An experiment, a Jaded Clam and some conclusions – continued from Part I.
One month ago I installed a unique tracking device on the old Horndog blog as an experiment. It tracked users’ mouse events — including whenever text or images are highlighted and/or copied.
For 4 weeks, it collected data. The results were surprising to say the least.
In the first 2-week period:
- Over 4,000 words copied
- The copying was done by 154 unique visitors
(a minority — less than 4% of site traffic in 2 weeks) - Of those, only 3 sources generated back-traffic
- About one dozen posts were hit on a regular basis
- 11 images were copied
- Of those, only one had permission and gave credit. (Thanks Jeffrey!)
- One copied image included my faked signature that appears at the end of every post. (Good luck with that whoever you are…)
Students with bad habits
While these results are not conclusive, they are disheartening. A few specific articles that involved time, thought and research were getting copied on a regular basis over this 2-week period.
The search terms used to find these posts and the “.edu” (institutions of education) web servers associated with these terms suggest that these are mostly students.
Worth noting too is the timing of this 4-week experiment which coincided with school semesters coming to an end. Term papers weigh heavily on some students’ minds. Some choose to take shortcuts. They make bad decisions to copy-and-paste their assignments from web sites.
For these misguided students — who will hopefully mature into more responsible adults one day — a Jaded Clam is well-deserved.
Stage 2 – disabling right-click
Next, I disabled the right-click mouse feature with a little bit of coding. This made it more difficult for highlighting and copying to be done.
For 2 more weeks, this new coding did its thing and more data was collected.
The results?
The copying ended — completely. The same dozen or so articles from the previous 2-week test period were hit on numerous times from .edu web servers, but this time no copies were made.
Our Copy-and-Paste Culture
As noted here and in Part I, taking other people’s work — words, graphics, software or other media — for some people is no longer a clear, black-and-white issue. It is perceived as something morally gray or worse, as a non-issue.
A pervasive thought is that if the source is online it may be treated with less respect than something in print. So endemic is this feeling in wired youth-culture that for some, illegally downloading software, pirating music and stealing intellectual property is no longer viewed for what it is — stealing.
And for anyone caught red-handed that claims innocence — or has the cheek to proclaim a high-minded purpose to deflect complete responsibility — the fact still remains; this is stealing.
Conclusions
What did I learn from this 4-week experiment?
Thwarting piracy can be an endless game of Whack-a-Mole, but at the very least one can rely on the inherent laziness of people who steal. Like house burglars, at the slightest bit of discouragement word-pirates will go away and look elsewhere for easier prey.
The big picture here is not so much that my words are being copied. In a way I suppose, I am flattered that some people might find them worthy of copying.
The bigger moral dilemma is the conundrum this experiment has created; it has opened a Pandora’s box.
I no longer blog in blissful ignorance of plagiarizers. Leaving an open door on Horndog Blog now feels a little bit like enabling a drug addict.
One supposes that in many regards the World Wide Web is still a bit like the Wild, Wild West. It’s not a bad idea to protect some of the tempting goodies from bandits and yahoos.
Yes — this absolutely runs contrary to current trends in Creative Commons licensing. But at least for the time being the two elements of this experiment — the tracing software remains in place.
