Copy Cats: Internet and other rip-offs

Es Turó. It’s a restaurant near Santa Margalida. It is part of a famous old building – S’Alqueria. I like the place immensely. And I must declare an interest – the restaurant is a client.

I googled Es Turó and S’Alqueria yesterday because I wanted some background information on a feature about the old building. I stumbled across an entry for the restaurant. Clicked. Seemed familiar. Very familiar. I recognised the words. I had written them. I went further. Very, very familiar. Restaurants, bars, other places. Alcúdia, Pollensa. Very familiar. My words, my photos. Many of them were mine, except for the logos or photos that clients had provided.

I’m not naming the website for the simple reason that I have no desire to publicise it or to give it houseroom. Am I bothered? Up to a point, but more than anything I just felt it was pathetic.

It’s easy enough to lift from other websites. Often it goes unnoticed because the sites are unnoticed. I only found this particular one by chance and because Es Turó is rarely mentioned; it stuck out like a sore and copied thumb. I shall send the site an email, if I can be bothered. Depending on the response, I might let you know how I get on.

Lifting stuff from other sites, stuff that is proprietary in that it has been originated, is hardly unusual. It happens all the time. There isn’t a lot you can do about it, unless you’re a big or litigious organisation, of which there are some. But there is copying onto another site, and then there are other types of copying.

A while ago, I held back on doing a blog item, but I’m resurrecting the theme now, as it seems apposite to do so. It had to do with the excellent puertopollensa.com. The owner of the site, on its forum, mentioned an article from “The Sun”, which – in part – bore similarity to the blurb on the home page of the site. Not intimate with this blurb, I had a look, and I had a look at the article. The two were indeed similar. Too similar for the article’s reference to Puerto Pollensa not to have been based on it. In mitigation, it is just possible that this reference was found on another site, or indeed on more than one. So it may have seemed to have been somehow without origin. But this would not negate the similarity.

Plagiarism is something no journalist or writer ever wants to be accused of. It is also something that makes no sense. If you are a writer, you write – your own words. That’s why you are a writer, or a journalist. You want to use your words, paint your own pictures. Yet the journalist in this instance was well-known, well-respected. I could hardly believe what I was reading when comparing the article and the site’s home page.

I emailed the owner, Zelda, and told her that I was staggered by it. I can understand websites taking stuff (though I don’t approve of it, anything but), but I can’t understand a journalist doing the same. My impression was, and I apologise in advance if this was not the case, that the journalist had not even been to Puerto Pollensa. Had she, she surely would have penned her own words. Because Puerto Pollensa demands one’s own impressions, and because this is what writers do.

Or so I thought.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.