Astrology, Copyright and Plagiarism

By Tony Vowles

Blogging is a personal and very rewarding pursuit. Technically it is easy for someone with basic IT skills to produce a website that appears very slick – beautifully designed templates can be slotted in at the click of a few buttons with no need for design or programming skills. All you need to do is author content. This is where the joy of writing comes in – the imagination, the literary skill and the hours poring over content. Personally, I hardly ever read what other astrology bloggers have written on a topic until I’ve written my own – I don’t want to be sidetracked by something mentioned. I also don’t want to subconsciously take it in and end up repeating it. My work is my life blood – my soul is in there and I know it is the same for many others.

So it should come as no surprise that the idea of your work being plagiarised feels almost the same as someone breaking into your house! The question is, what can/do you do about it? I think it’s important to try and distinguish between what is a simple mistake – a lack of understanding of copyright, wanting to share your material (but doing it badly), and outright copying for personal gain. Both happen, perhaps more frequently than we realise. I’ve worked in IT long enough to know that sometimes people do and think the most ridiculous things – believing that a wireless mouse and flat screen monitor speeds up a PC for instance! It’s easy to see how copyright might be a completely alien concept to someone like that – in these cases a gentle reminder should be enough. You never know, the exchange could turn into a friendship – after all, it is nice to know that someone values what you’ve written and want to share it with their network.

So, what of the other type? You’ve no doubt seen them – an exploitation of the ease of creating websites by producing something that has no heart and soul – no personal investment – that investment is being taken from you! There seems to be a great many of these around and from what I can discern their interest is in receiving revenue from ad clicks and bundled offerings. With such a lack of investment from the owners I suspect many wouldn’t last too long. However, it isn’t difficult to create lots of them, exploit keywords for Google placement, and let the pennies roll in – like a cash cow.

We all have to consider how we’d like our content represented – external links provide clickthroughs to our site (which is good) but does it portray our brand in the way we intention? If it doesn’t, then it’s worth considering that our product could be weakened in some way, despite the extra traffic.

Copyright violation is against the law and we do have the ability to close down sites if push comes to shove. Check out this Wikipedia article on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Google Analytics helps – we can see an amazing amount of detail about traffic to our site – if you’re not using it then you should be! There are also varying levels of copyright services available to aid us. Copyscape offers a free service where you can input the URL of your page and it scours the internet looking for duplicated content. They also provide a paid premium service for more sophisticated protection.

So, there’s much to consider with copyright and plagiarism. It is complicated; the law is tricky and differs across boundaries. It isn’t always black and white but there are free tools at our disposal to help fight it. If you know of other tools and utilities then fill up the comments section here with your ideas!

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Hailing from the UK, Tony calls himself an amateur astrologer and social networker. He has been studying Astrology for about 20 years on and off and also has a background and interest in Martial Arts and Zen Buddhism. His astrology blog is aptly named The Astrology Blog
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Blogging vs. Website–The Importance of Social Interaction in Promoting Astrology

By Jamie Funk

This topic came up recently in a Facebook discussion, which arose from a post on the astrology of the Google Buzz launch. I said that “the leading internet astrologers” are jumping onboard. Defining “leading Internet astrologers” was the next step. This is distinct from the leading astrologers who author books, lecture at conferences or have websites with educational information, but who do not actively engage with others on the internet. To clarify I’ll give a few examples. From the popular culture style of astrology, Elsa Panizzon and Jeffrey Kishner are leading internet astrologers who engage with their user base at their blogs and forums. From the more traditional side of astrology, Noel Tyl and Deborah Houlding would be considered leading Internet astrologers because they engage with their forum members.

Blogs and forums have not been around so long, maybe a decade. Some astrologers are into it and some are not, that’s OK. Books, lectures and websites are an essential source of information for people learning about astrology, but these days the Internet is all about two-way interaction, making new contacts and sharing our ideas. It is making the world a smaller place and lets us form relationship, which would have otherwise been impossible. So the astrological community is part of this process. New people drawn to astrology are more likely to stay with it if they can interact with astrologers at all levels and share their ideas and get feedback.

The Internet is great for astrology in general. It makes so much information freely available but we need to be able to discuss it, debate what is being posted. I have read a fair few articles that I think are misleading at the very least but there is nowhere to leave comments. Time will tell, but I think lecturing style of astrology on the Internet will become less relevant. Ideas need to be challenged for any philosophy to evolve, and the Internet is the perfect medium for this evolution to occur quickly.

Astrology itself has now become a medium for social interaction on the Internet. I’m sure Marina and I are not the first couple to have met in this way. Friendships are started everyday all over the world in astrology forums and networking sites like Facebook. This is promoting astrology more into the mainstream than classes or conferences could ever have done. The language of this social interactions is astrology, whether it’s comparing sun signs for beginners, or sharing thoughts on the secondary progressions of a composite chart for full on astro nerds like me.

What it really comes down to is that people are going to be more drawn to astrology and end up promoting it themselves, if they can interact with others more experienced. Forums seem to be a bit limited in this. Just my personal intuition, but I think the explosion in the number of astrology bloggers is a sign that this community is moving toward a new level of social interaction. The comments on blog article are life forum threads, just like comments on personal pages or fan pages on Facebook. The advantage of blogs articles is that they are not lost in the ocean of babble on forums, and they are indexed on blogs and on the search engines. These are becoming the new reference material for astrologers, more so than books even. It does promote astrology in the best fashion I believe, and most importantly it is available to anyone in the world who has access to a computer, regardless of his or her socio-economic status.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License from Flickr

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About the Author


Jamie Funk hangs his blogging hat at “Funkastrology–Cutting Edge Astrology for Uranian Times which he shares with his fiance Marina. Funkastrology has been listed in The Mountain Astrologer as a hot blog to watch. Of course it is!