So how much damage does this really do?

1. 91

   Pcunixposted 12 years ago

   I have one hub that has this "copied" message on it:
   
   "Please review the automatically generated warning below, and correct the problem if possible. These warnings are only visible to you, the author. Please click on the warning to learn more."
   
   I know why it has the message.  Sit on your hands for a minute while I tell the whole story..
   
   I'm not sure when I first wrote this little bit of humorous fiction about Her Holy Pinkness, The Invisible Pink Unicorn.  It might have even been done as a newsgroup posting originally; it's that old.  Or I may have put it on one of my early, early websites and put links out on a newsgroup.  This is mid 1990's and I'm not the sharpest tack in the box..
   
   Anyway, wherever it was, it was later picked up by another site and merged with other little things other folks had written about She of the Holy Invisible Hooves.. and yes, they gave me credit.
   
   Then, more recently, I took a look at what I had written and decided that it could use a little work. It was, after all, something I had dashed off in all of fifteen minutes, so I decided I'd flesh it out a bit and pretend that I was some slightly nutso translator fighting with yet another translator about how to properly translate this supposedly ancient story..  maybe not everyones cup of tea, but it amused me and when I was done, what better place than HubPages to publish it?
   
   So I did, but because I left some sentences as originally written, Copyscape and Hubpages and I presume Google too notice that some percentage of the sentences at the hub appear at that IPU site - of course there are a lot of sentences there that are NOT part of my hub and a lot in my hub that are not at that site too, but apparently "enough" similarity to cause the conflict.
   
   I don't think you need to read those things to understand the question, so I won't give a hint as to the title, though you could probably find it easily enough if you wanted to.  My question is, how much does this hurt?  Does it matter that one of more than 300 hubs is seen as a possible duplicate?   Should I make the not inconsiderable effort to rewrite every paragraph to avoid this?
   
   Opinions, please or facts if you have 'em :-)

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      Mark Ewbieposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      If you had spun it you'd probably have got away with it.
      
      There may be a new morals in operation.

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      1. 91

         Pcunixposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Well, conceited s.o.b. that I am, I rather liked some of my original phrasing.. so I didn't want to spin it..  I wanted to expand it.

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2. 72

   everymomposted 12 years ago

   I think it could potentially hurt your reputation on HubPages because people who do not know the back story will take it at face value that you plagiarized, even if it is from your own work. I would take the time to spin it, if that means just tweaking the original sentence grammar and perhaps using synonyms for the original nouns. I have no hard facts for this, just a qualitative gut feeling! Hope this helps!

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3. 80

   DougBerryposted 12 years ago

   I just got one and it was because I quoted press releases that are available online.  Sheesh.  I edited them and added some text.  But really, press releases are there for us to quote.  I've entire press releases run as-is with no changes.  Did I complain?  Heck, no!

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