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."
I absolutely agree! Here's my take on it:
Lots of people have been taking this very seriously, well media studies students are taking this seriously. Earnest discussions in academia are all very well, but who are the guilty ones? 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. Similar stories on subjects eliciting similar comments do not pass this test, since even lazy journalists can have the same ideas as brilliant bloggers.
You just pasted that entire headline straight from the article!
really 867993
Karma schkarma
after all, Roland Pipsqueak could have been a contender! [/rocky balboa]
This is MY take on it:
Lots of people have been taking this very seriously, well media studies students are taking this seriously. Earnest discussions in academia are all very well, but who are the guilty ones? 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. Similar stories on subjects eliciting similar comments do not pass this test, since even lazy journalists can have the same ideas as brilliant bloggers.
So THAT'S what people mean when they say, "I researched it online."
A-Bomb
Sue them
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
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.
As a blogger (I actually started "blogging" almost 15 years ago on my BBS), I believe that the entire idea behind copyright is pretty lame. The income of bloggers comes from 3 mechanisms that really don't make copyright as important, and I think in the future we'll see some interesting google anti-"plagiarism" tools.
Bloggers can make their money from ad revenue (adsense and the like), subscriptions and donations. A good blogger can easily make a low 5-figure income if they're good about consistency. Blogger information tends to be very real-time (even non-editorial pieces). Few bloggers publish book-style information, although this is growing. The audience of a blogger is sometimes one-time visitors, but the goal is repeat visitors. Blogs without repeat visitors in my opinion are failures (but this is disputable).
I believe that google or a competitor is on the verge of "This page is almost identical to" style cross-linking. If an online newspaper posts an exact copy of a blog, or a book author rips off a paragraph from another, the browser toolbars will make short work of noticing it. We are very close with search engine heuristic research to take bigger snapshots than just "completely naked MILF" search tags.
For a blogger to get copied without recognition, I can understand the anger. A newspaper stole their information! So what. The newspaper is dead. All a blogger has to do is mention who is quoted them (verbatim in some cases) and use it to build their following. Sure, being quoted in print might make it hard to find, and if you aren't referenced, then the paper is making income from your work, but NO newspaper could exist for very long strictly on "robbing" content.
Take advantage of the free press even if they don't mention you. Bloggers have something similar to a newspaper in proving they wrote it first: caching search engines and "look backwards" web archives. All you need to do is make sure your blog is getting captured, and you can easily prove to your visitors that you've been quoted in the Floor Avenue Journal.
How can you say that about journalists? PROFESSIONAL journalists, as they will quickly insist?
Obviously the bloggers have stolen the stories from the mainstream media, then traveled back in time so they could post the stories "first" and thus embarrass the MSM.
(Seriously, I'm sure that it's happening. But I wouldn't put some bloggers past copying material from other sources and then backdating it in an effort to make themselves look "connected".)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Blog = Google topic + Paste links + Add opinions from my over inflated ego; That is so much better than edit, copy, paste news
Bytes - IT Community
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
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.
= = = = =
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
I mean, with all the quality control, detailed background search, and preservation of journalistic ethics that goes into their work, they just don't have any time anymore to actually write their own stories. And that's not even taking into account all the time that those poor, overworked journalists have to invest in being talking heads on various television shows and "news" programs, all the hors-d'oeuvres they have to consume at Washington and New York parties with important people, and all the fake book reviews they have to write for their own books on Amazon.
I mean, seriously...how many stories has Slashdot lifted from other tech sites?
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I have been reading this guy's stuff for a couple years, and it's already happened to him a couple times. Just recently, there was a radio guy that stole his piece about Cameron Diaz : http://maddox.xmission.com/.
I think part of the problem is that most of the print press doesn't realize how many people actually read this stuff. Maddox has a counter on each of his articles that shows unique visitors, and at the time of this radio guy ripping him off, this article already had 312,000 visitors, and over 100 million total for his site.
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
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?
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
The results are here .
...it appeared on Slashdot three days earlier.
HEYY-OHHHHHHH!
Breakfast served all day!
As a journalist I have a little inside information for you: sometimes this happens and it's not plagiarism. Let me explain the logic:
The author of the press release has no problem with you copying his or her material. In fact, he or she would prefer it. Press releases are worded in the best possible terms for the company sending them out. So some journalists see no problem using that material. And this isn't plagiarism (technically) since the author of the press release understands and, indeed, hopes it will happen (OED definition of plagiarism: "the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.) of another."). Sometimes journalists borrow certain descriptions because the authors, being authorities on the topic (or at least having access to authorities on the topic), know how to phrase things in the most accurate terms.
I, as well as most journalists, don't do this and, in fact, look down on it. But some see no problem with it. And technically it's not plagiarism.
And also, most good journalists, if they do this, will append the statement with "according to the company's press release" which I consider to be an acceptable practice if used sparingly with subjects, such as scientific terminology, that can lose meaning in the translation from the press release to the journalist's writing.
Sorry for the long post, but I thought you'd be interested.
It should have been obvious that the media were just lifting blog entries, when the Sunday Times ran their groundbreaking editorial entitled "OMG OMG WTF R U TLAKING ABOUT?1111!!"
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.
1) Blogging will be outlawed
or
2) Megabucks Media incorporated will lift stories with impunity... then sue the living daylights out of whatever damn fool Blogger originally put up the work.. ."
As to (1), how do you figure blogging will be outlawed? Blogging is really just a form of writing, with distribution via the Internet. The newsmedia is already being forced to change how they do business, based on what bloggers have been doing. Thousands if not millions of people freely express their opinions online without any trouble, and given that outlawing blogging would be akin to outlawing newspapers, there is no way news media professionals would get behind such a prohibition anyway. They depend on freedom of speech, and they know restricting it would run counter to their own interests. Beyond that, even if they were interested in outlawing blogging somehow, even the most righteous social conservative would be firmly opposed to this. For every muck-raking blog, there is a dittohead blog. The Bush Administration is having a tough enough time selling its own party on its main agenda items these days. Attempting to outlaw blogs would be an absurd diversion that would quickly get shot down.
As to your second assumption, news organizations have to sell to advertisers and the public. It's how they stay alive. They know that if they were to actually countersue a blogger, when they were the plagiarists, the truth would out. They still have to sell ad space. They still have to convince people reading or watching the news that they follow ethical guidelines. Look at the damage that has been done to the NYT with all of their recent high-profile ethics problems. One news outfit might sue a blogger, but if they're in the wrong, the courts will find for the blogger. The legal system has its problems, but it is not so screwed up that little guys can't win when the facts are in their favor. The hit to credibility in such a case would be huge, and all of the other mainstream media companies would act as quickly as possible to distance themselves from that sort of behavior.
Civil liberties have been taking a hit for the last four years, but the Bill of Rights still has force. Plus, judging by the opinion polls, even the voters who brought Bush into office are starting to realize that his fear-based policies don't make any sense. I think Americans are easily swayed in the short term, but in the long term they won't buy the argument that dissent must be muzzled and big business should get its way regardless of the consequences.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ