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

The new "Reader's Digest"?

[Opportunist]

Nobody can read the whole internet. Nobody. So what people do is they rely on others to pick the interesting pieces worth reading and go from there.

But there are 2 ways to do it: Summing up the content and providing a link, or ripping a few lines out of context and then mentioning in the fine print where they're from.

While the first is something I do agree with, the second stinks of "I don't have content but I want visitors, but if I hand out my sources my visitors might go there instead of to me."

So while I'm all for gathering info and making it available to your readers, I'm also very much against the "Readers Digest" approach: Snipping out what I deem valuable, copying it to my page and giving half-hearted credit to the real author. Linking is cool. Copy-paste-blogging is just lame.

And I'd really wish this message could be sent to those who do it just that way.

Re:The new "Reader's Digest"?

[briancarnell]

"But there are 2 ways to do it: Summing up the content and providing a link, or ripping a few lines out of context and then mentioning in the fine print where they're from. ...

So while I'm all for gathering info and making it available to your readers, I'm also very much against the "Readers Digest" approach: Snipping out what I deem valuable, copying it to my page and giving half-hearted credit to the real author. Linking is cool. Copy-paste-blogging is just lame."

Yes, some bloggers do the equivalent of e-mail threads where they copy an entire piece, blockquote it and then add one or two sentences additionally. That's stupid.

But there are reasons to quote extensively from materials provided you're offering extensive commentary in return (and giving the proper credit up front to the author you're quoting from).

1. Summing up the content is not always that easy to do. I've seen plenty of mainstream media reports where the two paragraph summary completely misrepresents what was actually said. Where possible, I try to quote as extensively as possible precisely to avoid the appearance of mischaracterizing someone's argument.

2. Linking is great but my experience in about 10 years of writing for my own web site is that about 80% of the things you link to will be 404 within two years. Not to mention sites like the BBC's where if you go back to a story a couple years later it will likely have been completely rewritten without any sort of notice that changes were made post-publication to the text.

How ironic

[SuperBanana]

How ironic this should be on slashdot, given that slashdot story submitters have a nasty habit of simply quoting an entire block of text for the article summary.

For example:

• the story directly below this one on Python programming
• The story about nuclear reactors
• The story about Wired Magazine's release of AT&T stuff

Sometimes the block of text is preceeded by "from the article:", but half the time, it is presented as comments from the story submitter, and the Story Approvers (I refuse to call them editors) do absolutely squat to correct it.

Quoting is good!

[Kelson]

Given the volatile nature of the web today, there's an excellent chance that the page you link to today will be gone 6 months from now. If you want your post to have any value in the future, it needs to be more than just "Hey, look here!" (Although except in the case of the shortest source articles, copy+pasting the entire page is bad form.)

Of course, for your post to have any value today, just quoting isn't enough. At that point, it may as well be a link. You have to provide some commentary, maybe your opinion, maybe additional information, or maybe you're just using the quote as a springboard to go off on your own topic.

It comes down to a balance: are the quotes there to support and/or provide context for your own words? Are they there as a summary so that someone wandering by a year from now knows what people are talking about? Or is it little more than an unauthorized mirror?

The fix is silly

[Umbral Blot]

I thought the proposed "solution" in the article was just stupid. The idea that somehow the law should police millions of blogs by applying some kind of complex formula to determine if they are in the wrong is just not feasable. Even if blogs are the worst source of plagerism there is really nothing that can be done about it, except raise public awareness.

Blogs

[linvir]

This is how my usual Google trail goes, using a research session for my university course as an example.

First site:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/19/cuba_switchin g_to_gn.html

Cuba switching to GNU/Linux
Cuba is switching away from Windows to GNU/Linux. I have to say that I was a little surprised when I was last in Cuba and saw many of the PCs running Windows.

Cuba's director of information technology, Roberto del Puerto, says that Cuba already has approximately 1500 computers running on Linux, and is working towards replacing Windows on all state owned computers.

Link

Which leads me to: http://linux.slashdot.org/

Tony Montana writes "According to several news sites the government of Cuba is dumping Windows in favour of Linux. Cuba's director of information technology, Roberto del Puerto, says that Cuba already has approximately 1500 computers running on Linux, and is working towards replacing Windows on all state owned computers."

And the only link out of those that's still up is http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23300, which contains only:

ONE OF the last bastions of revolutionary socialism, Cuba is to switch all its computers over to Linux to counter the influence of the Evil Capitalistic American lackey Microsoft.

According to the government daily, Juventud Rebelde, Roberto del Puerto, director of the state office of information technology, said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of Windows through-out Cuba. Cuba already has 1,500 computers using Linux. Although what flavour is not clear.

More here.

So all this plagiarised summarisation bullshit leads me only to http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050517/tc_afp/cubaco mputersitlinux

Sorry, the page you requested was not found.

And before I know it, 15 minutes are gone and all I've learned is that 1500 computers have been switched. Thank you plagiarism. And the beatiful irony of it all is that I'm contributing to it with this post!

Re:Bzzzzt!

[Haeleth]

its not plagiarism if you cite the source - passing off the work as your own is one of the things that seperates copyright infringement from plagiarism.

You are right to say that it is a question of presentation. You are wrong to say that citing the source necessarily stops it being plagiarism.

For example, the following paragraph would be an example of plagiarism:

In this comment, Whiney Mac Fanboy explains one difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement, namely whether you are passing the work off as your own or not. It's not plagiarism if you cite the source, though it may still be an inappropriate use.

Why is that plagiarism? I cited the source, didn't I? Yes, but I didn't identify which words were my own and which were a paraphrase of what you said -- and that might be a deliberate attempt to make the reader assume that some of what I wrote was a commentary on or interpretation of your comment, when in fact it is simply a straight copy of your words with only minimal rearrangement. In other words, plagiarism.