by Joseph T. Sin­clair

Sev­er­al years ago I had the occa­sion to use Spin Rewriter soft­ware for a five-day tri­al. This is a pro­gram which takes any arti­cle (or chap­ter) and rewrites it. The soft­ware actu­al­ly aims at cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent copies of an arti­cle for post­ing on var­i­ous pub­lish­er-con­trolled web­sites in order to pro­vide SEO (search engine opti­miza­tion) for a web­site. But a sec­ondary pur­pose is also to grab your arti­cle off the web and rewrite it for my com­mer­cial use so as to avoid copy­right

How well does it work? Well, that depends on what the use is. It seems to work pret­ty well for SEO; but Google changes its search algo­rithms all the time, and the word is out that Google has sup­pressed the flood­ing of arti­cles on the web to be an inef­fec­tive SEO tech­nique.

Nonethe­less, Spin Rewriter is indeed effec­tive and very clever. It does an amaz­ing job of rewrit­ing. And it enables a user to manip­u­late the pro­gram to rewrite arti­cles using a vari­ety of lit­er­ary and gram­mat­i­cal tech­niques. In the end, how­ev­er, it pro­vides an arti­cle that is awk­ward­ly writ­ten with inappropriate—but not incorrect—words.

But regret­tably that’s not the end of the sto­ry. If I’m an expert in a par­tic­u­lar area and need to write an arti­cle, I can write more effi­cient­ly from scratch than using Spin Rewriter to rewrite your arti­cle on the same top­ic. So where’s the val­ue? Well, the val­ue is for cre­at­ing arti­cles for which I have no exper­tise. I can sim­ply take your arti­cle on the top­ic (a top­ic with which I’m unfa­mil­iar) and spin rewrite it with the soft­ware. Although the result may be an unus­able arti­cle, I can then edit the arti­cle and make it right with a lot less effort than try­ing to write an arti­cle on the top­ic myself from scratch.

I‘ve only tried the soft­ware a few times, but it’s easy to imag­ine myself becom­ing adroit in the use of the soft­ware to rou­tine­ly rewrite the arti­cles of oth­er authors and avoid copy­right infringe­ment. In oth­er words, the edit­ing of a spin-rewrit­ten arti­cle is a lot less work than writ­ing such an arti­cle from scratch when one is not famil­iar with the sub­ject mat­ter.

You would be mis­tak­en to assume that this soft­ware is light­weight and gim­micky. It is very pow­er­ful soft­ware that takes advan­tage of the user’s per­son­al com­put­er pow­er as well as the pro­gram­ming in the cloud. Cloud com­put­er pow­er is unlim­it­ed. This soft­ware is not offered as a stand­alone pro­gram but is a pro­gram­ming ser­vice used via the cloud.

I’m sor­ry to report that I sus­pect the soft­ware is just the open­ing round of pow­er­ful soft­ware that will be avail­able in the future to achieve much the same pur­pose. Thus, what­ev­er you write is eas­i­ly trans­formable via com­put­er into some­body else’s pur­port­ed author­ship with­out any copy­right infringe­ment. The copy­right laws pro­tect your text as writ­ten but do not pro­tect your ideas, your lists, or your forms. And there is no assur­ance that the copy­right laws will pro­tect your text if rewrit­ten by soft­ware. Even if the copy­right laws pro­vide such pro­tec­tion, infringe­ment will be very dif­fi­cult to prove in court.

You can expect those who are not mem­bers of the literati to use this soft­ware with­out com­punc­tion. But what about the literati, those who are rep­utable active authors and pub­lish­ers? They can be expect­ed to be a lit­tle bit more sen­si­tive to the copy­right pro­tec­tion of oth­ers. But ulti­mate­ly I doubt that mem­ber­ship in the literati will stop them from using such soft­ware. They will just use it more care­ful­ly than oth­ers.

No, I don’t use Spin Rewriter. I don’t think it enables sus­tain­able SEO, and I have no inter­est in writ­ing except in my own fields of exper­tise. Yet, Spin Rewriter has no dearth of users.

One can inter­pret this to mean that the author as a pro­duc­tive mem­ber of soci­ety, who deserves ade­quate com­pen­sa­tion for his or her ser­vices, is screwed. I think that would be short­sight­ed. Rather the efforts of authors and pub­lish­ers should be to adapt to the new real­i­ties of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing what­ev­er they may be and use them as much up as pos­si­ble to work in their favor. What that means in regard to Spin Rewriter, I just don’t know. It’s some­thing for all of us to think about. What I do know is that the future is here to stay, and we have to learn to live with it.