Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper Plagiarizes Blog, Taunts Real Author
iandennismiller writes "I've been keeping an eye on this viral marketing campaign called Petite Lap Giraffe — it's the DirecTV ads with the Russian guy and the tiny giraffe. I was pretty quick to debunk the existence of the giraffes, so a lot of people have been visiting my blog as a result. Today, I noticed a New-York area newspaper that was represented my research as their own, so I asked them to link to my blog (i.e. provide attribution). What ended up happening perfectly illustrates that newspapers just don't understand how the Internet works ..."
on top of crap on top of crap.
Ah, Slashdot. Where pointless and petty feuds between nobodies is front page material.
I'm not sure what you mean. When I look at the blog, it's black text on a white background, fixed width, centered. The font's kinda big, but that's about it. It's about as simple as you can get. Now if he had a busy background image, he may have removed it to conserve bandwidth, i'm not sure, but as of 8:24pst, it's a pretty dead simple page, and is perfectly readable. If anything it's TOO readable.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Step one in that process, of course, being "get on the front page of /."
I would think that having a story posted to Slashdot is a pretty good way to go about doing that... .
It's not just that the saw his post and decided to write an article about the same thing, it's that they used specific facts that he had worked to uncover in their story.
Does that create a legal, copyright obligation? No, facts are not copyrightable. Does it create an ethical obligation, in an journalistic or academic context where citing sources of information is important? Yep.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You really need to read more academic (probably focus on literature) rules on plagiarism. They're pretty strict, and if you can't show your original thought, and what you wrote is the same as what someone else wrote, it's plagiarism. Journalism has a nice little habit of avoiding academic rules, though, because they actually get paid and can use that money for lawyers.
That's arguable either way - it's certainly not a copyright issue, but plagiarism is a much broader term - but it's gone way beyond that since the newspaper have chosen to act like rude, unprofessional asshats.
They paraphrased this guy's findings, he contacted them and asked for attribution. Had they been reasonable people, they then had the option to say: "Of course, we've added a thank you and a link to the bottom of our article." or (in private, as a direct response to the blogger in question) "It is publicly available information; as such we don't feel that attribution is necessary or appropriate in this case, and therefore we will not be providing it.".
I don't doubt he would've complained if they'd chosen the latter, and I may even have agreed with him, but it would've been an issue with two reasonable points of view in play. What the newspaper actually chose to do was publicly add the following to the article: "A quick domain name lookup...which is free and public information...will give you those details, which we acquired - you know, being a newspaper with research capabilities and all - of our own accord (although some are trying to claim this information as their own “discovery” as a way to promote their own personal website! But enough of that...)". All the evidence suggests that they are snide, rude, and childish - I'm far more concerned about that than about the technicalities of plagiarism.
Maybe so, I find the newspaper's mocking edit to the newspaper's article to be wholly unprofessional, not to mention having a distinct overtone of the snide, slimy breed schoolyard bully about it:
A quick domain name lookup...which is free and public information...will give you those details, which we acquired - you know, being a newspaper with research capabilities and all - of our own accord (although some are trying to claim this information as their own “discovery” as a way to promote their own personal website! But enough of that...)
Even if the blogger was totally fabricating these claims (seemingly unlikely, given the changes made to the article's presentation) there would be absolutely no call for any journalist to resort to petty mudslinging like this. If they feel they are in the right, wouldn't a personal reply explaining that have been far, far preferable?
Plagiarism is not about "lifting sentences" it is about presenting ideas/facts from another source as if they are your own. Thoroughly re-writing an essay so that none of the sentences resemble the original IS STILL PLAGIARISM.
In fact in my discipline (psychology) we are expected to re-write sentences from cited sources instead of just copying them.
Plagiarism is plagiarism regardless of where it occurs. And yes it is standard practice in journalism to cite your sources even if you are basically ripping off their content.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Copying metaphor is duplication of creative style and thought. Facts aren't covered by copyright. While it's really sleezy to read a news article and write a new News Article based on what you learned--it's not plagiarism.
We call it plagiarism because it is plagiarism.
The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own
Come on. When you read an article about something you know well, you can judge quality of journalism. Usually it's quite poor.
Journalism has a nice little habit of avoiding academic rules, though, because they actually get paid and can use that money for lawyers.
Actually, journalism manages to avoid academic rules by not being part of an academic institution. The lawyers are largely unnecessary since no laws are broken.
It was served with an HTTP 304 code (meaning “unmodified”) which suggests the favicon was already in someone’s cache. That means the page had previously been loaded.
This means they were going back to check the blog before publishing and it hadn't changed. This could happen from a laptop that had previously read his blog at home and then at work they opened up their laptop to verify they stole his ideas correctly.