Bloggers are the New Plagiarism

mjeppsen writes "PlagiarismToday offers a thought-provoking article that frankly discusses concerns with plagiarism and rote content theft among bloggers. In the section entitled "Block quotes by the Dozen" the author mentions the so-called "gray area". That is PlagiarismToday's classification of the common blogger practice of re-using large blocks of text/content from the original article or source, even when the source is attributed."

Comments

Err...

[consonant]

So? What's the problem?

This could be a good thing, like this slashdotter here, who's mirrored the entire Mark Klein statement from Wired.com.

Granted, each example may not be that of mirroring, or even a fisking, but if the source is attributed properly..

SO WHAT????

RepublicanBlogs

[Buzz_Litebeer]

I hate Republican hate blogs that are out there and focus on half of one side of a story to make it look as bad as possible for anyone other than themselves.

The worst part, is that they link to themselves over and over and over and over and over and over worse than a hick family tree were all the grandmas grandpas, children and grand children descended fromt he same 2 people.

Take a recent look on google for "iran dress code" and you will see hundreds of Republican blogs on the subject, all citing other republican blogs as the definitive and truthful source, when in the end the story was put up as a sensational tabloid article with no truth behind it at all.

Bloggers are not the new news media, they are just a bunch of people who have found out a place were people will read their opinions, nod their heads, and help them mentally wack themselves off at how awsome they are and how many people they can get to agree.

Plagarism isnt even the half of it, these people cite sources that cite sources to the point were it would be difficult to find out were the original story came from, its like a horrible game of telephone gone awry, or the before mentioned incestuous family forgetting whose kid little jenny is.

Re:Bzzzzt!

[jrockway]

So Apple calling their version of FreeBSD OS X is plagarism then?

nebulous and insulting rules suck.

[twitter]

The author's ideas are not very original and are mostly insulting. The very act of linking and pointing is creation of new content. Outlawing it on blogs is about as silly as forbiding people to quote the newspaper over breakfast.

Here's what they have to say for themselves: Many people are obsessed not with how to best disperse information and participate in this sharing revolution, but with how much they can get away with legally and ethically. In a parallel to the famous John F. Kennedy quote, we need to stop asking what others can do for us, and ask what we can do for them. Rather than simply wondering what we can get away with or how we can get the most for the least amount of work, we need to figure out how we can best participate in this world-wide discussion. If the ethics of the blogging world are constantly abused to promote the gain of others, high quality writers will have little motivation to post their works on-line and, as the well slowly dries up, there will be less and less work available for either reuse or for simply reading.

Wow, why don't you just come out and call every one a thief like the RIAA does?

These are the same attacks on fair use that Google is having to fight against to offer their excellent news aggregation service. Google was right and the above is wrong headed. No one is losing readers because of Google. The fact that the author could not come up with hard and fast rules proves that they are simply wrong. If you can't say this specific thing is wrong, you can't make a law about it.