If you are trying to hire someone to write you a book, article or something else, how do you know whether or not they’ve copied any material from other people?

This is a valid question because you don’t want to get into trouble with the original author and furthermore you don’t want to damage your reputation. After all, word spreads fast over the internet.

Typically, when you are dealing with companies such as Elance, it’s pretty much stated in the rules that it is going to be their own creative thought. However, that doesn’t guarantee that they will check each piece for plagiarism. So, what you can do instead is say something like this in your ad, “To avoid plagiarism all writing will be verified with Copyscape.” or you can make it very clear that you’re going to be double-checking the content to make sure that it is truly their content. The one thing that you’ve got to remember that’s really going to help you out with using something like Elance is the fact that they are in the middle of each transaction making sure that things are run smoothly. Not only that, but the freelancers on Elance don’t just want the money, they also want positive feedback.

One thing you want to look for when you’re identifying individuals to work for you, is finding people that have good feedback and have done multiple different projects. You’ll come across something they call a five-point scale. This is very helpful for me because it is one of the criteria I use to judge whether to hire someone or not. Typically, I don’t hire anybody who rates under a 4.8 and they have to have done multiple jobs. You don’t want to hire some newbie that only has one person that gave them a 5.0. That’s not good enough. Look for people that have been on there for a while. Those people are not going to do that kind of stuff because most of them understand that feedback is king and the only way they’re going to continue getting paid is if they don’t get kicked off the Elance network. If they get kicked off, they’re going to lose their income stream.

I actually had distributed an article that was written by a freelancer back in 2003. I had hired somebody who took somebody else’s work and put it in an article and gave it to me. I didn’t find out until the next year and by that time I couldn’t do much about it because there was no way I could take it off all the article locations I had distributed it to. However, I did take it down from all the locations that I could find and I reported it to Elance as quickly as I could. I also let my friends know never to hire that individual. As a result, they got kicked off and were taken care of. So, it’s something to think about.

If any of this is still not comforting enough for you, you can always find a contract or have one written up by your lawyer to help you to protect your rights, but really I wouldn’t worry too much about it. But basically letting your freelancer know you can check if the work has been plagiarized is a good deterrent in stopping it from happening to you.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

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