In all my years of blogging, I haven’t caught any incidents of blatant plagiarism of my posts… until now.  I was looking  through the martial arts posts and saw this post on the MartialArtsOutfitters.com blog posted Thursday.  It immediately seemed to me that it looked just like a post that I had posted a year and a half ago. (See: Yoroi Kumiuchi.) Then I realized that they were the same word-for-word.

This is blatant plagiarism. I mean they copied everything including the photo (granted that was public domain and not mine) and title, and then published them on the same platform (i.e. WordPress.) This wasn’t reblogged, which is a function that I allow because it comes with attribution and a hit to one’s site. The fact that reblogging would have been easier for them to do means that this company was outright trying to steal content.

What’s particularly sad to me is that the thief is an organization that is involved with martial arts. The martial arts should be about advancing virtue not practicing vice. I guess they are targeting those scheezy pedophile “teachers” one hears about in the news, and not high-caliber martial artists.

What is doubly disappointing is that this is a business, and, thus, one would expect that they would be in favor of people paying for what they take in principle.

If you are a WordPress blogger and write martial arts posts, you might want to look at the feed of http://www.martialartsoutfitters.com to make sure they aren’t ripping you off.

If you are a supplier of http://www.martialartsoutfitters.com, be warned they don’t feel obliged to pay for what they take.