Question about PLR articles

PLR articles written by copywriters that research their topic well and understand good grammar are usually not available online without cost. So beware what you're choosing to use.

I always recommend re-writing PLR to the point that your version can't be recognized from the original. You won't be breaking the law if you use original PLR that is sold by the author for the express purpose of using it as PLR. You will have a "license" to use it as you wish.

It's when you use free content from the Internet that most problems of authorship arise. Often the distributor scraped a site for the material (illegally), or in many cases, he will not be able to say where the material came from because he didn't buy it either . . . it might have been a freebie from a site, purchased on Fiverr, or eBay, or who knows where?

The best to you,

Steve

Sounds like a good topic for a report

Completely agree with Steve B here. Good stuff.

Best of Luck!

I don't fully agree, because you'll never know where the material really comes from, even if the author puts hes name on it. I've seen a lot of graphical PD which at least to me seems very similar to stock material, Just have a look into Google images or a free images site with a stock advertising beneath. (I know there's a common saying that you have to change at least a certain percent in order to create a new image).

Similar to text material.

Several years ago I was lucky enough to be a freelance editor in chief of a shareware mag (print) with a cover CD. I put a freeware program on it that played MP3 files. Soon after publishing this mag, we got in legal conflicts with the company that had a patent on the mp3 algorithm. I tried to contact the programmer to clear this, but he had disappeard meanwhile (no more email, no address...).

There's a similar issue with a German producer of music and video software. You can easily create your own songs etc with this software and they encourage you to distribute your music. But, as stated somewhere very hidden and in small letters, you are not allowed to use these songs commercially. So if you use a such generated song for your YT video and have an advertising on the video, it's commercial. AFAIK they have persued a lot of people therefore.

I happened to find a similar thing with my brand new DSLR. I can do videos with it, but I can't use them commercially. I even don't know if this still applies if I edit this video in my licensed Camtasia or whatsoever video editing software.

All tis is a matter of the codecs used, and there are lots of multimedia programs (like music or video converting software etc) where you don't know which codecs are used and what the rights are.

Back to the PD: AFAIK there's only few new PD nowadays (was great in the late 1980s and later), but many of the authors were unhappy that PD sellers made a lot of money (for copying a disc) with their work.

Copying articles for the net you can get in trouble either for copyright violation or for duplicate content publishing. I guess you should be careful. At least add original content to your website as well. And probably it is more save and not so expensive to order original niche articles from any copywriting services.

Plagiarism Checker - Free Online Software For Plagiarism Detection

Thanks for pointing out these services, didn't know them yet ;-)

For a first check you could use Google, as already stated by others.

Another great tool I often used in the past is Plagiarisma.net. It's not completely free (they have free and a premium services). I had some problems with their prooving reports (they also mark common phrases, so you might get a bad uniqueness result), but it's always better than not to proof anything...