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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."
This isn't only a problem with main stream media taking blogger's content. Main stream media outlets have been taking content off the web and calling it their own for some time.
About two years ago there was a BBC article that stated some incorrect things about angular momentum, and me being a stickler for proper use of Physics terms, contacted the author. He stated that I was wrong and he "knew" it was correct because he had got the information from the researchers. I contacted the researchers, which were NOT listed in the article nor on the page anywhere, after being given their contact info by the BBC reporter. They agreed with me that the use of the term was incorrect but gave some reasons for why they thought it would be easier for the laymen to understand. They also pointed me to their press release on the subject. Lo and behold if their press release was not taken word for word and put on the BBC and tagged with a different author. When I brought this to the attention of the BBC reporter he started ignoring me.
Main stream media has been taking the content they choose and calling it their own for some time. Unfortunatly there doesn't seem to be anyway of controlling this because the media has a vested interest maintaining the status quo.
Well that ends my rant.
Why should bloggers ignore it when newspapers make money by copying their writings?
Unauthorized copying and distributing of intellectual property is generally a Federal crime... And probably even far worse when done for a profit...
Media companies (of all types) seem to be getting their way that copyright protection is essential to their business model... If they are violating their own laws, then I say let them taste their own medicine!
Forget dreams of recongition.... If the front page of NYT was copied off your blog, you wouldn't sue? Just think of the paper sales, advertisement revenue, and national recongition they they are getting from *your* work.
I may just be browsing in a bad way, but I couldn't find any links showing the supposed articles that were 'copying' the blogs, all I could find was a quote of an article "suspiciouly similar". Is it so hard to post links to the articles or take screenshots so you can directly compare them? One of the articles accused The Guardian of lifting the idea for using Vickey Pollard quotes when covering the election. Excuse me but Little Britain was the most popular show on TV at the time and you couldn't go 10 minutes without someone quoting it. It isn't too much of a stretch to assume that people would come up with using little britain quotes to talk about the election in a similar way. Newspaper writers aren't stupid, they know that if they rip off something people will notice, they'll lose their well paid jobs and won't ever be employed in the newspaper business again
a) When the Mac Mini was first announced and a certain open source media hub project was announced soon after, I wrote a commentary that Apple would certainly launch a fully integrated iApp type solution within the year, rendering the open source venture obsolete. This was picked up by a specific blog, with no credit to my posting on their own forums. b) More recently, and more specific than the last example, after Apple announced a major investment in Flash memory supplies, rather than comment on the obvious use in future iPods, I discussed the practicality of a Powerbook Nano. A totally solid state machine designed for instant on and robust handling. Effectively, the next iBook - and ideal for destructive kids. The same Mac blog then discussed this, again, NOT crediting my posting on several forums, their's included! (Separately, I believe that a touch screen pen / keyboard hybrid could be on the horizon too.) Anyway, as a technical innovator, I believe the theft of ideas to be as great a sin as the theft of physical property, and should be punished accordingly. Hmmm?
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Acutally a google search for "define: blog" returns 28 results (definitions). You just picked one that happened to support your stance.
Just because somebody or some entity (corporation, organization e.g. Google Blog, IE Blog, Mozillazine, etc.) picks a blog as the medium to communicate to the world doesn't make their information or opinions any more worthless than some attention whore / self-involved twit / sellout who decided to publish a book or write a magazine article. It really irritates me when people (usually old people) disregard any information that came from the "interweb" and wasn't published on paper. Look, the medium is irrelevant to content. Sure there are bad blogs that are as you described, I'll even concede that it's the vast majority of them (livejournal/myspace), but the medium is relatively new and there are a number of very quality blogs on a wide variety of topics that are informative and worth reading. But then if you think about it, is the ratio of bad blogs to good blogs any worse than the ratio of bad to good books or magazines or tv shows or newspapers?
What happens when they sue you for copyright infringement?
If they had the chutzpah to do that, it wouldn't be hard to show that the article was up on your own site first. You could point to a cached version at Google or the Wayback Machine, for example.
That's why copyright is important - when the cost of duplication is zero, the only way to stop someone from ripping off your work is with a legal club.
When the cost of duplication is zero, it doesn't make much sense to talk about "ripping off". The copy that's on a newspaper's web site doesn't detract from the copy that's on your own web site.
It is important to give credit, and to that effect I believe anti-fraud laws should be enforced against plagiarists, but that's it.
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... probably because it would be hard to pick just one blog.
There are literally thousands of bot-driven spam blogs out there that just steal articles from other sources, be they blogs or mainstream news articles, and post them as their own to benefit from ad revenue.
Plagiarism of other kinds is amusing to find sometimes, though. I remember doing a project on Hayao Miyazaki when I was in highschool. I found what appeared to be a pretty legit (based on other sources that I'd read) biography of him online... and then found it again, and again and again on numerous different legit-looking sites, all credited to different authors. I even found one that was translated sentence by sentence into French. Needless to say, it made writing my Works Cited section difficult.
It's really scary how fast a story can spread through the media, too.
In my spare time, I happen to do the publicity for a local sports club. Someone gave a comment to a media rep a few weeks ago, saying that we were hiring a full-time coach for the first time. We don't know exactly where the story originated; it wasn't any of the executive committee, nor the coach concerned, so presumably came from a not-particularly-well-informed club member.
That wound up on the AP wire, and within 24 hours, it had made a couple of the big national papers, the BBC News web site, and goodness knows how many local press contacts. The organisers, including myself, aren't professional administrators -- we all have day jobs, and volunteer to help run the club in our free time -- and we were so swamped with enquiries from media contacts that we had to set up a press releases page on our web site setting the record straight, and in some cases switch off mobile phones during the day so we didn't keep getting disturbed at work by people who'd managed to track down a personal number.
The really scary thing is that the article was completely wrong. The coach in question had been with us for some time, and his role hadn't really changed, nor had that of the 20 or so other professionals we bring in to help coach our members. But once it's been "researched" by a "normally reliable source" (that description from the BBC person we contacted to ask what they were talking about in their article) it gets everywhere.
In other words, I don't think it much matters whether something is "researched on-line" or not any more. The level of research behind a lot of the stories you read is shockingly bad, and often many of the big news outlets will be running a whole story of a single small piece on one of the news wires. Whether that's accurate, and whether it comes from an off-hand comment overheard in a bar or it's lifted from a blog of unknown quality, doesn't much seem to matter.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.