Copywrong

I was reading a blog post by Great She Elephant and it mentioned in passing something called "Copyscape", in a context that implied it was some kind of anti-plagiarism tool. I'd never heard of it, so I was curious to take a look because I wondered how it might work. It invited me to see if any of my work had been plagiarised (by someone other than me, since I "repurpose" material all the time. I put in a random blog page, and was shocked to see that the system threw up four cases of plagiarism, on sites that I didn't recognise. The system then suggested that if I clicked on the page link, Copyscape would highlight the words that had been copied from blog. Outrage rising up my gullet second-by-second, I clicked.

The copied words?

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How dumb is Copyscape? There must be millions of pages with these words on them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]