Slashdot Mirror
Bloggers create Press Plagiarist Of The Year Award
mccalli writes "The BBC is reporting that certain bloggers, fed up of seeing their work just lifted by the mainstream press, have created The Press Plagiarist Of The Year award. Examples are given of national newspapers simply cutting and pasting entire articles from web sites and passing them off as their own."
Perhaps a link to the winner would be more appropriate than to the list of nominations?
r -is.html
Here it is, in all its glory: http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/2005/12/and-winne
If the claim is true and the bloggers haven't authorized the plagarism then that is an egregious infringement of copyright. Said bloggers should sue those lazy newspapers.
Let Guido remind you of the nomination criteria: a story has to be pinched from an original blog source, either verbatim or in essence, and no credit / payment given to the original source. This qualifies as plagiarism.
It also qualifies as copyright violation. This is PRECICELY what copyright is for.
Under the Berne convention and laws implementing it, such postings are born copyrighted, notice or no. Verbatim lifting of the entire text, or the bulk of it, is not fair use.
And while a net posting is intended to be read, it's intended to be read on the original site and in its original context. Posting may imply consent for the copying necessary for viewing, network cacheing, linking, and probably indexing and archiving. But it doesn't imply permission to copy it into a commercial (or even non-commercial) news medium without either payment or credit.
When the intent is just to get the news out and such copying would thus be welcomed, the author can explicitly waive his rights or grant additional permissions under stated terms by a footnote license or declaration. (Indeed, such grants are common - Public Domain, open document, quote-with-credit, etc.) In the absense of such a grant, copyright applies full force.
Such an author may receive only small or intangible benefit from his posting in its original place. Such benefits might be reputation, increased public influence, or in increase in traffic to a web site driving advertising revenue or advancing some other purpose of the site. But that doesn't mean copying his material does little damage. If the item is newsworthy and sufficiently well-formed for publication, it is as potentially saleable to news outlets as similar output from a person who makes his living as a reporter. This revenue is denied the author if the publisher simply copies the text without payment - or a reporter passes it off as his own work, receiving his paycheck while the author gets nothing.
Under copyright it is the author's right to demand whatever payment he wants and refuse permission unless agreement is reached. And if a publisher copies his work without permission, it is his right to sue for the damages - including the price he might have reasonably negotiated - and for a statutory minimum if he can't prove a higher amount is due.
Lots of people have been taking this very seriously, well media studies students are taking this seriously.
I should hope the publishers are taking this seriously, too. They're the ones with their necks on the legal block. Every winner of this award (and every nominee) is a potential loser of a big lawsuit. And if the first one isn't open-and-shut, once it's one the rest will be.
The irony, of course, is that it's the same media corporations that make such a screech about "piracy" of their entertainment content that operate the publications where this infringement is taking place. If they don't want to be hoist on their own petard they need to do some serious housecleaning among their own operations.
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And before the peanut gallery opens up with some snide comments claiming hypocracy on the part of slashdot posters, let me point out a few things:
1) I'm not stating a personal opinion about what's RIGHT in the above. I'm just pointing out my understanding of the CURRENT LAW. (Note: IANAL.)
2) The posters on this forum, and the members of movements commonly associated with it, are individuals with varying opinions. And there are multiple groups with differing consensus opinions hanging out here as well. Different posters with different opinions do not make the forum hypocritical.
3) "Intellectual Property" (government limitations on ideas, their expression, and their use) is not a unified all-or-nothing issue. There are a host of component parts. (Examples: Copyright versus patent. Length of protection. Extent of protection (what constitutes "fair use"). What is covered (software, "look-and-feel", public performance, N-note-
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It is the purpose of a press-release. But its purpose does not include putting your own name to the release. You can only sign with your name if you actually wrote the article. Including the whole text as your article is not the same thing as writing the article. It is important to be clear when works are referenced.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The results are here .
It's not strictly "plagarism" because companies and groups that put out press releases HOPE that their release and info gets picked up. A press release won't have "copyright" just for this reason.
Plagiarism is not copying without permission. It is the act of intentionally passing off another person's work as your own. It is based on ethics rather than law.
If Student X writes a term paper for a class, and X helps Y to pass off sections of this paper as if it were his own work, then Y is a plagiarist (and X is a cheater as well).
Or: If Student Z was told to write an original poem for a class, but she instead merely copied, without attribution, an obscure poem from the 19th century, then she has plagiarised this work. Copying the work was legally okay, but not ethically okay.
How this applies to newspapers depends on the current standards of journalistic ethics. In the US, the ghostwriting of Celebrities' books is nowadays generally expected. Perhaps journalism is in a similar state in the US and the UK.
My wife and I went to a lawyer to get some legal advice on her possibly pursuing a copyright infringement suit against a movie studio. The lawyer explained that copyright suits have to take place in federal courts and that it would probably take twenty to thirty grand just to get the suit to trial and another twenty or so to finish the trial. Even if the suit is a ``no brainer'' in the plaintiff's favor, we were told that the defendant almost certainly won't even think about settling until all motions to dismiss are heard and discover has been completed.
About.com did a copy-paste of a blog entry from Digital Inspiration verbatim.