Just because I’m really nit-picky about this (since it is an area of my expertise), plagiarism is typically the termed that is used in an academic setting. In the context Prasanth is referencing, it would be called copyright infringement. Copyright protects the expression of ideas. That being said, fair use is a very common affirmative defense to copyright infringement. Fair use is determined off of a four part non-exclusive test that balances the the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market. In a situation where you might be copying a review done by a company like Amazon there isn’t really a market for Amazon’s review, so fair use is quite expansive. I have no idea what the google impact is for your site on such an issue; my discussion is simply about the legal aspect of doing so.
Thank you for clarifying those points.
Just to add a note about fair use: I believe that concept applies mainly in the United States. In other jurisdictions, there are similar concepts, such as fair dealing, but the details might be different. You will know better than me what the differences are. I mention this because anyone reading this discussion would have to take those differences into account when applying your advice.
Mike
Solid point Mikl. I am speaking primarily from a U.S. perspective, but there certainly are differences in other jurisdictions. Fair dealing under English law is much more restrictive than fair use.
I agree with many of them in the above discussion that if you are writing a review before reading everyone’s review then you content has approximately 10% chances of being duplicate. As it is possible that those two persons are having same views but it is not possible that they both use same selection of keywords to explain their views. And to check the duplicate content you can use Google webmaster tools or Copyscape.I think this might help you.
Well, the original question was not how to check for duplicate content but how to avoid it when writing reviews. I think that question has been answered in some detail.
But in any case, Copyscape would not necessarily work in this case. Assuming we are talking about user-submitted reviews, of the type you see on shopping sites like Amazon, any duplicate text is likely to be small compared to the page as a whole. Think of a typical Amazon product page, that might contain an extensive product description along with information about prices, availability, how to order, etc. And it would typically contain maybe half a dozen user reviews. If your own content duplicates, say, one paragraph of one of those reviews, then only a small percentage of the page as a whole will be duplicated, and that would probably not be enough to be flagged in Copyscape.
Mike
Anyone can use content of one place at another place for information sharing purpose. For example, daily news is repeated on different sites in form of ads. However, we can avoid the copy content tag by describing the source link(the link from where you took the piece of content) in the footer of our web page.