8 ms·

When a newspaper “rips off” your blog, then taunts you about it…

102 points by franze 16y ago

imgabe 16y ago
I applaud you for pushing the English language forward with new words like "kindof". (I'm actually not being sarcastic. "Kind of" as a concept is one we use so frequently it might as well have its own word)
jshort 16y ago
I see this sort of plagiarism occur all of the time, for all sources of media and from different mediums. Very often without any sort of citation used for the original source. I don't think providing a link is adequate at all times either, as that one article that goes viral in a sense could be the one that makes your blog gain that needed popularity for success. If everyone views your work on another site your blog doesn't get all of those valuable hits. All in all I don't know how this problem could be policed.
teilo 16y ago
Yes, it is not a news-flash that the bulk of modern "journalists" are, for the most part, low paid college grads who lack the ethical standards of journalism in which their forebears prided themselves. But there are still plenty of serious journalists out there. Thankfully, in the Internet age, we can be choosy where we get our news.
- ppereira 16y ago
  Regarding the ethical standards of earlier generations of journalists and copying, see INS v AP, 248 U.S. 215 (1918) where INS rewrote large numbers of news articles they acquired from AP through bribery and other means, without attribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._Associated_Press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._A... This is the origin of the "hot news" idea of short-term copyright, balancing the effort of the original writer with the public's need to know the news. The linked scenario, however, is quite different.
- ilamont 16y ago
  Don't be so sure. Many plagiarists have old-school journalism backgrounds. Last year, the "Cooks Source" editor in Western Mass. copy and pasted much of the content in her magazine from Internet sources before getting caught, and had gotten her start at The Voice decades before (see http://mashable.com/2010/11/06/cooks-source/ http://mashable.com/2010/11/06/cooks-source/ ). Earlier in my career, one of my colleagues was fired for lifting from Wikipedia, who was also from an old-school newspaper background. Many more examples of this.
impendia 16y ago
You say that you don't really want anyone to get fired over this. It's a noble attitude, and I admire it. I am a college professor, and even though I observe at the end of each term that some of my students have failed to learn anything, I don't really want anyone to fail. However, ...
edanm 16y ago
Reminds of of this case, which happened to famous CS blogger Scott Aaronson: Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=277 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=277 tl;dr of the article: Someone created an Australian commercial for a printer. Two models are talking physics/CS to each other, and the tagline is "A more intelligent model". The models' script is copied from one of Scott Aaronson's lectures. I think he ended up contacting them, and getting them to donate $5,000 to a CS foundation (instead of sewing them for copyright violations).
- cjtenny 16y ago
  Sounds like even without legal action, the case was /sewn/ shut!
DaveChild 16y ago
Plagiarism? Really? They didn't copy the text of the article, did they? They wrote their own, based on the original source. That's hardly unusual. I'm not even sure it's unethical. At most it warrants an attribution, but this witch-hunt is way over the top.
- _delirium 16y ago
  If it were a crime to rewrite/summarize an article without attributing it, about half of TechCrunch would be illegal. Though perhaps the difference is that we expect "real" newspapers to be better.
  - jancona 16y ago
    AFAIK, no one is claiming that plagiarism is a crime. It's just unethical, and those who do it should be called out.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      FWIW user 'hazors' is saying this is a case of stealing, ie claiming it to be a crime: "Plagarism isn't just taking things word for word, if you take anyone's ideas without permission, YOU ARE STEALING."
- jancona 16y ago
  Lack of attribution is precisely what TFA is complaining about. Plagiarism is claiming others' work as your own, not necessarily copying. So lack of attribution is really what defines it.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  Copying text (or close paraphrasing) == Copyright Problem Using someone's ideas/text/research without attribution is plagiarism. They are two different considerations, commonly confused. You can violate copyright without plagiarising, and you can plagiarise without breaking copyright. It's an ethical consideration, certainly, unfortunately it is so persuasive nowadays that no one does anything much but shrug and say "yep, aren't they rude"
jarin 16y ago
It strikes me as kind of strange that some newspapers have absolutely no problem citing tweets as sources of information, but are too proud to admit they got a fact from a blogger.
- chc 16y ago
  Tweets are just people talking; blogs are the newspaper industry's competition.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- mahmud 16y ago
  Tweets imply immediacy, crowd witness, etc. While blogs imply longer writing, research & fact-checking. Quoting a tweet is like quoting a dude in a crowd, but a bloger is someone doing the same thing as you. No one ever got caught in a public riot and wrote an essay about it on the spot, but they tweet about it.
  - lurker17 16y ago
    There is no more research or fact-checking implied by a blog than by a series of tweets. There is only longer writing.
- Untitled 16y ago
  > It strikes me as kind of strange that some newspapers have absolutely no problem citing tweets as sources of information That disease struck CNN extremely hard. It is not a news organization anymore - it just aggregates second and third hand hearsay from twitter. (Al Jazeera or Sky news tends to be better...)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >"but are too proud to admit they got a fact from a blogger." Too proud? Where do you get that from. As I see it someone looked at the blog post, clicked through to the petitelapgiraffe.com site and wrote about that site. If they should write: Source: petitelapgiraffe.com Referred from: iandennismiller.com Should they also write who they were referred to iandennismiller.com from, who referred them there, etc., etc.. If they saw the story elsewhere first and then scouted around to see what people were writing about it, looking for an angle, then do they still need to write a "referred by" line? If they looked over someones shoulder on the metro and saw the original site do they have to cite that? Just seems a bit silly.
kosmonaut 16y ago
For your own health and well-being, let it go and move on with your life. Your energy could be best spent elsewhere.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Your energy could be best spent doing something other than telling others how to spend their energy.
bradleyland 16y ago
Kudos to Ian for his detective work, but it is not entirely inconceivable that someone else wouldn't have done exactly the same thing and -- surprise, surprise -- reach exactly the same conclusion. This seems like a bit of an overreaction.
- nollidge 16y ago
  The server logs he mentions at the end of the article are rather convincing (if circumstantial) evidence.
  - jarin 16y ago
    It may not be admissible in a court of law, but it's key evidence in the court of opinion!
  - bradleyland 16y ago
    Fair enough. I read the article portion, but didn't make it through all the updates at the end.
patio11 16y ago
This is a career ender -- instantaneously -- if you do it to another print publication. Somebody at the Washington Post lifted a few paragraphs of one article from a newspaper you've never heard of in Arizona. Bam, lost her job the same day it was brought to the ombudsman's attention. However, if you just run a website, you are not a journalist and the unwritten rules do not apply. (This is one of the cultural reasons why newspapers cannot conceive of getting out of the dead tree distribution business, even if it is killing them -- that is the source of their power and privilege, after all.)
- Alex3917 16y ago
  I've caught lots of journalists plagiarizing, including Chris Hedges, and none of them have ever gotten fired. I even caught our state senator Toni Boucher plagiarizing an article she 'wrote', and it's not like she was forced to step down. I'm sure folks do get fired for plagiarism, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule, where mostly no one cares until the complaints start getting loud enough.
- chc 16y ago
  You're right, but you're also not distinguishing finely enough. Pulling text directly from somebody else's story (even with minor modifications) is a deadly no-no if you get caught. But that isn't what happened here. She didn't copy one paragraph from his story — she just took his facts and wrote her own story around them. Basically, she treated the blog post as a lead rather than a source. It's generally seen as a lesser crime, if they think of it as a crime at all — I know some newspapers actually encourage it — and it's far more common.
  - hazors 16y ago
    Plagarism isn't just taking things word for word, if you take anyone's ideas without permission, YOU ARE STEALING. Furthermore, this author didn't even bother cross checking the blog post with any source. If something is common knowledge then you would have a case, at it is obviously not the case here, this is pure and simple plagarism. Re-using the exact same image is just insult to injury. The main issue here is they had the opportunity to cite the source before and afterword with a simple and free link. Instead they thought they would be Gob and just rewrite history, too bad for them they are not exactly bright with journalism or technology. Negative publicity is a given, but they deserve worse for all covering up this dipsh*t did after the fact.
kmfrk 16y ago
For future references, here is a great resource for future plagiarism woes: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/ http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/.
velane19 16y ago
Bonjours, ce n'est pas un journal chinois pourtant car ils sont les maitres en plagias et autre contrefaçons. Comme quoi les mauvaises habitudes se prennent très vite. En france, on n'entant pas encore de pareilles plagias mais je pense que cela ne devrai pas tarder hélas !!! velane19 http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/ http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ruethewhirled 16y ago
Ahh it all make sense now. Lots of these news articles come from slashdot
velane19 16y ago
- E-mailing de masse - Tout comme vous je reçois chaque jour une bonne centaine d’E-mails publicitaires. Cela ne me dérange pas trop outre mesure, et je ne fais pas partie de ceux qui hurlent immédiatement au spam loin de la. Les éliminer me prend tout au plus une minute car sur G-mail il y a un petit " carré " qui marche très bien, mais parmi eux, il y en a certains qui m’intéressent quand même , car ils proposent des produits ou des trucs et des bidules et autres machins qui pourraient parfaitement figurer dans mon catalogue web ( c'est à dire ma corbeille )..... http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/ http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/

102 points by franze 16y ago

I applaud you for pushing the English language forward with new words like "kindof". (I'm actually not being sarcastic. "Kind of" as a concept is one we use so frequently it might as well have its own word)

jshort 16y ago

I see this sort of plagiarism occur all of the time, for all sources of media and from different mediums. Very often without any sort of citation used for the original source. I don't think providing a link is adequate at all times either, as that one article that goes viral in a sense could be the one that makes your blog gain that needed popularity for success. If everyone views your work on another site your blog doesn't get all of those valuable hits. All in all I don't know how this problem could be policed.

teilo 16y ago

Yes, it is not a news-flash that the bulk of modern "journalists" are, for the most part, low paid college grads who lack the ethical standards of journalism in which their forebears prided themselves. But there are still plenty of serious journalists out there. Thankfully, in the Internet age, we can be choosy where we get our news.

ppereira 16y ago
Regarding the ethical standards of earlier generations of journalists and copying, see INS v AP, 248 U.S. 215 (1918) where INS rewrote large numbers of news articles they acquired from AP through bribery and other means, without attribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._Associated_Press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._A... This is the origin of the "hot news" idea of short-term copyright, balancing the effort of the original writer with the public's need to know the news. The linked scenario, however, is quite different.
ilamont 16y ago
Don't be so sure. Many plagiarists have old-school journalism backgrounds. Last year, the "Cooks Source" editor in Western Mass. copy and pasted much of the content in her magazine from Internet sources before getting caught, and had gotten her start at The Voice decades before (see http://mashable.com/2010/11/06/cooks-source/ http://mashable.com/2010/11/06/cooks-source/ ). Earlier in my career, one of my colleagues was fired for lifting from Wikipedia, who was also from an old-school newspaper background. Many more examples of this.

impendia 16y ago

You say that you don't really want anyone to get fired over this. It's a noble attitude, and I admire it. I am a college professor, and even though I observe at the end of each term that some of my students have failed to learn anything, I don't really want anyone to fail. However, ...

edanm 16y ago

Reminds of of this case, which happened to famous CS blogger Scott Aaronson: Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=277 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=277 tl;dr of the article: Someone created an Australian commercial for a printer. Two models are talking physics/CS to each other, and the tagline is "A more intelligent model". The models' script is copied from one of Scott Aaronson's lectures. I think he ended up contacting them, and getting them to donate $5,000 to a CS foundation (instead of sewing them for copyright violations).

cjtenny 16y ago
Sounds like even without legal action, the case was /sewn/ shut!

DaveChild 16y ago

Plagiarism? Really? They didn't copy the text of the article, did they? They wrote their own, based on the original source. That's hardly unusual. I'm not even sure it's unethical. At most it warrants an attribution, but this witch-hunt is way over the top.

_delirium 16y ago
If it were a crime to rewrite/summarize an article without attributing it, about half of TechCrunch would be illegal. Though perhaps the difference is that we expect "real" newspapers to be better.
- jancona 16y ago
  AFAIK, no one is claiming that plagiarism is a crime. It's just unethical, and those who do it should be called out.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    FWIW user 'hazors' is saying this is a case of stealing, ie claiming it to be a crime: "Plagarism isn't just taking things word for word, if you take anyone's ideas without permission, YOU ARE STEALING."
jancona 16y ago
Lack of attribution is precisely what TFA is complaining about. Plagiarism is claiming others' work as your own, not necessarily copying. So lack of attribution is really what defines it.
ErrantX 16y ago
Copying text (or close paraphrasing) == Copyright Problem Using someone's ideas/text/research without attribution is plagiarism. They are two different considerations, commonly confused. You can violate copyright without plagiarising, and you can plagiarise without breaking copyright. It's an ethical consideration, certainly, unfortunately it is so persuasive nowadays that no one does anything much but shrug and say "yep, aren't they rude"

jarin 16y ago

It strikes me as kind of strange that some newspapers have absolutely no problem citing tweets as sources of information, but are too proud to admit they got a fact from a blogger.

chc 16y ago
Tweets are just people talking; blogs are the newspaper industry's competition.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mahmud 16y ago
Tweets imply immediacy, crowd witness, etc. While blogs imply longer writing, research & fact-checking. Quoting a tweet is like quoting a dude in a crowd, but a bloger is someone doing the same thing as you. No one ever got caught in a public riot and wrote an essay about it on the spot, but they tweet about it.
- lurker17 16y ago
  There is no more research or fact-checking implied by a blog than by a series of tweets. There is only longer writing.
Untitled 16y ago
> It strikes me as kind of strange that some newspapers have absolutely no problem citing tweets as sources of information That disease struck CNN extremely hard. It is not a news organization anymore - it just aggregates second and third hand hearsay from twitter. (Al Jazeera or Sky news tends to be better...)
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>"but are too proud to admit they got a fact from a blogger." Too proud? Where do you get that from. As I see it someone looked at the blog post, clicked through to the petitelapgiraffe.com site and wrote about that site. If they should write: Source: petitelapgiraffe.com Referred from: iandennismiller.com Should they also write who they were referred to iandennismiller.com from, who referred them there, etc., etc.. If they saw the story elsewhere first and then scouted around to see what people were writing about it, looking for an angle, then do they still need to write a "referred by" line? If they looked over someones shoulder on the metro and saw the original site do they have to cite that? Just seems a bit silly.

kosmonaut 16y ago

For your own health and well-being, let it go and move on with your life. Your energy could be best spent elsewhere.

burgerbrain 16y ago
Your energy could be best spent doing something other than telling others how to spend their energy.

bradleyland 16y ago

Kudos to Ian for his detective work, but it is not entirely inconceivable that someone else wouldn't have done exactly the same thing and -- surprise, surprise -- reach exactly the same conclusion. This seems like a bit of an overreaction.

nollidge 16y ago
The server logs he mentions at the end of the article are rather convincing (if circumstantial) evidence.
- jarin 16y ago
  It may not be admissible in a court of law, but it's key evidence in the court of opinion!
- bradleyland 16y ago
  Fair enough. I read the article portion, but didn't make it through all the updates at the end.

patio11 16y ago

This is a career ender -- instantaneously -- if you do it to another print publication. Somebody at the Washington Post lifted a few paragraphs of one article from a newspaper you've never heard of in Arizona. Bam, lost her job the same day it was brought to the ombudsman's attention. However, if you just run a website, you are not a journalist and the unwritten rules do not apply. (This is one of the cultural reasons why newspapers cannot conceive of getting out of the dead tree distribution business, even if it is killing them -- that is the source of their power and privilege, after all.)

Alex3917 16y ago
I've caught lots of journalists plagiarizing, including Chris Hedges, and none of them have ever gotten fired. I even caught our state senator Toni Boucher plagiarizing an article she 'wrote', and it's not like she was forced to step down. I'm sure folks do get fired for plagiarism, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule, where mostly no one cares until the complaints start getting loud enough.
chc 16y ago
You're right, but you're also not distinguishing finely enough. Pulling text directly from somebody else's story (even with minor modifications) is a deadly no-no if you get caught. But that isn't what happened here. She didn't copy one paragraph from his story — she just took his facts and wrote her own story around them. Basically, she treated the blog post as a lead rather than a source. It's generally seen as a lesser crime, if they think of it as a crime at all — I know some newspapers actually encourage it — and it's far more common.
- hazors 16y ago
  Plagarism isn't just taking things word for word, if you take anyone's ideas without permission, YOU ARE STEALING. Furthermore, this author didn't even bother cross checking the blog post with any source. If something is common knowledge then you would have a case, at it is obviously not the case here, this is pure and simple plagarism. Re-using the exact same image is just insult to injury. The main issue here is they had the opportunity to cite the source before and afterword with a simple and free link. Instead they thought they would be Gob and just rewrite history, too bad for them they are not exactly bright with journalism or technology. Negative publicity is a given, but they deserve worse for all covering up this dipsh*t did after the fact.

kmfrk 16y ago

For future references, here is a great resource for future plagiarism woes: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/ http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/.

velane19 16y ago

Bonjours, ce n'est pas un journal chinois pourtant car ils sont les maitres en plagias et autre contrefaçons. Comme quoi les mauvaises habitudes se prennent très vite. En france, on n'entant pas encore de pareilles plagias mais je pense que cela ne devrai pas tarder hélas !!! velane19 http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/ http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ruethewhirled 16y ago

Ahh it all make sense now. Lots of these news articles come from slashdot

velane19 16y ago

- E-mailing de masse - Tout comme vous je reçois chaque jour une bonne centaine d’E-mails publicitaires. Cela ne me dérange pas trop outre mesure, et je ne fais pas partie de ceux qui hurlent immédiatement au spam loin de la. Les éliminer me prend tout au plus une minute car sur G-mail il y a un petit " carré " qui marche très bien, mais parmi eux, il y en a certains qui m’intéressent quand même , car ils proposent des produits ou des trucs et des bidules et autres machins qui pourraient parfaitement figurer dans mon catalogue web ( c'est à dire ma corbeille )..... http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/ http://webboutiquevelane19.blogspot.com/