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Plagiarism is the term given to the borrowing of someone else’s ideas and passing them around as one’s own. It exists in academia, in professional work environments, and any other field where there’s a creation of some kind of content involved.
It’s considered a serious offense, leading to copyright laws, fines, and even imprisonment (in some severe cases). Today, there are software and other special practices implemented to keep plagiarism in check.
This article is for web content makers and owners of the public content platforms, web developers, and anyone who can suddenly publish content that might become a subject of DMCA claim. A couple of examples are Twitter, GitHub, and Vimeo platforms that allow users to publish pictures, videos, and source codes that might appear to violate copyright laws.
Of course, when we are talking about Public resources like Twitter, it is not a problem for someone to write a web-crawler smart enough to analyze specific resources and copy/download all the possible content from it (or save the content on the user machine). In this case, your platform/web-site is simply one point in the content distribution chain and does not know how this content is supposed to be shared after all. Since it is a separate resource with its mission and reasons to work with this information (so they might need or don't need to satisfy DMCA rules), I don't think it's something you can do with it. Web-crawlers overall may become a massive problem in the DMCA applicability. On the other side, they play a substantial role as an external cache that allows people to find information lost on the original resource. So, web crawlers, not always bad, actually.
There are a few historical myths about free and open source software licenses that I would like to bust.
This is not always true. Price-wise, not all free software (more accurate term — proprietary freeware) is open source. Freedom-wise, not all open source software is free.