Tutorial Plagiarism?

A few weeks ago, I posted a tip to make Windows Vista blue screen on demand. I learned about this from a friend of mine at work and decided to post it. Yesterday I received an email from a person that had this tip posted on his site as well. He claimed that I stole his content and scolded me for not crediting his site. The content was written slightly different than I had, but it achieved the same result.

I have received a few of these ridiculous messages from web site owners from time to time claiming that I somehow stole content from their site. I’m shocked that these people actually believe they own the rights on how to do things. There are only so many ways you can perform a task or get something done on a computer. I guess the makers of all these new Windows Vista books should be suing each other, because they all have the same data in them. They all have the same tutorials and they all are just slightly different from one another.

As long as the content is not being copied verbatim, it is not plagiarism. We all have the right to learn information on our own and post it in our own words no matter how many other people did it first. Even if we learn the information from another web site, it is still not plagiarism. I never copy information and I always cite sources when I should.