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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 ..."
WTF?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
So is this where Judith Griggs, formerly of "Cooks Source" magazine, landed?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Ah, Slashdot. Where pointless and petty feuds between nobodies is front page material.
You aren't going to be able to make them admit to their plagiarism or post your comment on their site, so forget about that. However, you can make damn sure that, should anyone search for petite giraffes or longislandpress.com, they'll have a good chance of reading about this incident. So go out there and work to get this into Google's search results for one or both of those searches.
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)
Here's the details as far as I can tell: - The author of this blog wrote a post on 3/23 about some website which claims to sell "Petite Lap Giraffes" - Among other things he pointed out: - The domain was registered by "Grey Global Group", which is a marketing firm in New York - One image in particular on that site was clearly photoshopped. - He guesses it's somehow a secret DirecTV marketing campaign - On March 28th, some newspaper published a story about the same website, including all three of the above mentioned details. - He commented, asking that they credit him - They edited the story to argue that they did original research - His comment is "awaiting moderation" From my perspective, it seems like he has a pretty strong case, although technically there isn't enough evidence to assume they plagiarized. It's possible they could have just happened to make all of his observations (as the edited version of the article points out, the domain lookup aspect is trivial. That coupled with the other two things is pretty suspicious though...)
Agreed. I also found his blog to be TOO readable, so I didn't read it. I like to challenge myself with my reading material. That's why I stick to Where's Waldo?
I don't know what the complaining is about, either. It looks fine, though I'd maybe reduce the default font size a couple notches and maybe use a different background color for the quoted pieces just to set it off from the main article content itself. Hardly anything to get off track of the real story here, over. I mean, seriously, Press CTRL and flick the little wheel on the mouse a couple times and it looks just fine.
You can't copyright, trademark, or patent a fact. This guy is being ridiculous.
Actually, I'm fairly sure that to claim the 'fair use' argument, the original article has to be fully attributed. Which is this blogger's gripe in the first place...
Um, even if they'd seen his blog post and decided to write an article about the same thing, they have no obligation to credit him or defer to him.
If you see a wire piece about some news, you can look up the same sources then write about the same news without having to acknowledge whatever piece alerted you to the thing in the first place. Copying others text is a definite no-no. Follow others lead to write about the same thing is something every news organization does every day. You don't own the news even if you're first to write about it, no matter how much AP may be lobbying to change that.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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
Maybe you haven't had your original content lifted wholesale from your website and then republished by an organisation making a PROFIT off it. I have. It's not cool. They copy-pasted content without attribution (bad enough - you're only meant to do so for illustrative purposes - not as the basis for your article), and then turned around and started mocking the guy they stole it from, whilst still not providing attribution.
If another blogger stole his stuff, it wouldn't be much of a news story. The talentless scum do that on a daily basis. When a news organisation does it, it becomes newsworthy.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
If a blog takes a newspaper story and rewrites it as their own, it's fair use, but if a newspaper does it....
No it's not, it's still plagiarizing and mediocrity. Only that "professional" is expected to display much more professionalism than amateur bloggers. And if that's not the case, the deserve to be exposed as what they are: mediocres.
I don't have a sig.
I'm sorry, I just can't take this "feud" seriously, it's a fight between two imbeciles to see who is more clueless or gullible. And Ian is winning that fight hands down.
Can I get credit for debunking this myth 5 seconds after I saw the website, given that it's COMPLETELY OBVIOUS to 90% of the population that it's exactly the same theme as the DirecTV commercials that have been inundating network TV ever since the Superbowl?
Actually, I'm fairly sure that to claim the 'fair use' argument, the original article has to be fully attributed.
No, attribution is not required for fair use.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Actually, that also happens in the heart of nearby New York city, though under the covers of a non-english paper of good reputation. There were a couple lines that said "Edit" or something similar and I immediately knew they had stolen it from Wikipedia's spanish page. Googling the first sentence or so confirmed my suspicions.
This is seen as a "victimless" crime where I stand in the sidelines with the bitter knowledge that complaining to the big fish does nothing other than bring undue attention to myself and/or the actual victim of plagiarism... as best case scenario everyone's already read the same plagiarized information so an apology is printed only after the fact and will miss X percentage of the original readers. Content might be removed by the "criminal"* without comment if it is online and you're not lucky... but the scarrier thing that in USA whims might land you and the victim in court to give proof that the material is yours or whatever.
A smaller example of this problem is how impossible it is to kill name/backgroundCheck/credit report scrapers that clone your defunct geocities / Usenet pages and so on. Google, mylife et al make money off bulk-cloning our age, myspace posts, phone numbers and past and present addresses and employers. Since almost nobody hosts personal stuff on their own webservers "protected" by 'no-robots.txt', it's a wild west of "shoot first and inquire later" against webcrawlers. Worse, they provide no useful way to wilfully update bad data or remove unwanted entries, even if they're in housed in your local country.
* Stealing text I own copyright to NOT equally criminal as RIAA's copyright violation standard. Writers are better backed up by USA laws than individual bloggers and copyleft publishers just because cash and publishers+lawyers are a given.
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.
I'm pretty sure you can't copyright knowledge so the point is moot. The actual gripe is the blogger wanting recognition. What the blogger has managed to do is paste the issue on a website where people like to talk about copyright. So you can cue the NRTFA comments that have nothing to do with the article. And they paraphrased so the only place, I have seen, that would really care about it is academic journals.
Although the original article has been altered somewhat so direct comparison is impossible, I took the time to compare the two blog entries; one, his original entry on the subject, and two, his comments with direct quotes from the article.
Nowhere do they lift his words in the article. Not even one sentence, not even a half a sentence. So, no copyright infringement (at even the most generous definition of the word) and no plagerism. The news author just did some research and wrote an article.
This isn't a college paper, this is a newspaper article, and a brief one at that. (One could argue the newspaper version is a vast improvement, actually).
It may well be certain facts were gleaned from his blog entry .... facts that could have been independently verified by the news author. Verifiable facts do not enjoy copyright protection (deliberate lies inter-spread with facts do, believe it or not, that's how they copyright the phone book ... but if the alleged offender omits the lies, you're case is over).
That leaves lifting his words verbatim, which also didn't happen. Case dismissed.
Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992, a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright . . . . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Actually, I'm fairly sure that to claim the 'fair use' argument, the original article has to be fully attributed.
Nope, citation actually has next to nothing to do with it, at least under U.S. law. This is a critical difference between copyright infringement (a legal matter) and plagiarism (an ethical convention held among academics and journalists), and is commonly misunderstood.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
What if ALL this.... the original video... the blog posting... the plagerized article in some obscure newspaper... and the backlash that followed..... were ALL part of the marketing campaign?
-David
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.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Case Dismissed? Great! Let me just look up the case number in the docket... wait, there doesn't seem to have been a lawsuit? My legal counsel is suggesting that this might have been a question of "morals" and "ethics".
The newspaper's update seems to make it pretty clear that the author ripped off the blog post, and rather than give than linking to that blog, decided to act affronted that research performed by a third party deserved some modicum of respect. If the author had responded and even gone so far as to actively deny and politely deny the claims, I might be more willing to side with you.
The corner of a round room
Nowhere do they lift his words in the article. Not even one sentence, not even a half a sentence. So, no copyright infringement (at even the most generous definition of the word) and no plagerism
Direct lifting of actual text isn't required for 'plagerism'. Even half-addled middle school students have the 'copy the article and change all the words' trick down cold. It's still plagiarism.
The news author just did some research and wrote an article.
I'm pretty certain you don't know what 'research' is. Research entails collecting original sources, citing them, and drawing your own conclusions. Taking someone else's work and re-writing it without adding your own thought, and without citing the original is definitely not research. There's another word for taking someone else's ideas and claiming them as your own. Starts with a 'P'.
Verifiable facts do not enjoy copyright protection
Copyright violation and plagiarism aren't equivalent, and copyright isn't the issue here. The definition for plagiarism is looser and focuses on the original thought concept over the 'verifiable facts'.
Considering your response, I think some things are clear. You have no idea what plagiarism is. Certainly if you had ever been involved in original research, your sophomoric take on what it entails would have been corrected by your advisor. Doing what you're defending in an acadamic research environment would certainly result in an ethics violation and potentially dismissal. You also don't have a firm grasp on the boundaries between copyright and plagiarism, nor how they relate to each other, and when it's important to invoke one or the other.
I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this, but apparently a few mods have similar confusion and have promoted it to a level it doesn't deserve.
I simply googled a few lines from some of her other posts, and saw that has happened before. For Example googling "Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No" from her article http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/03/13/no-impact-man-screening-panel-discussion-march-13/ Pulls up a summary from this site, which was published months earlier. http://bkfreestore.tumblr.com/post/1336085827/no-impact-man-an-outdoor-film-screening-with-colin
Let the people who matter know - their fans and readers. http://www.facebook.com/board.php?uid=63558643546
Public backlash only happens when the part of the public who matters know about it.
Unless you have logs showing hits from IPs that resolve as being at the paper, I think Occam's Razor applies.
But they do: /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0 304 – “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0 /blog/2011/03/total-bummer-longislandpress-com-plagiarism-and-coverup/ HTTP/1.0" 200 13398 "http://www.longislandpress.com/[redacted wordpress admin.php]" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0"
Update: Since someone asked about my server logs, the answer is: yes, I checked them out. On March 28 (the date their article was published) I did log one request for favicon.ico that originated at mail.longislandpress.com. Here it is:
XXX.XXX.XXX.XX – - [28/Mar/2011:20:56:31 +0000] “GET
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. The timestamp is 20:56:31 UTC, meaning it was 4:56PM in New York. The timestamp on the original Long Island Press article is 5:02PM.
To put it in a simpler way: someone from longislandpress.com visited my site less than 10 minutes before they published the article in question. I have to admit I didn’t expect the timestamps to be so close to each other, but there they are!
Update: I kept going through the logs, and what do you know I noticed this entry, which originated from the same IP address as the previous entry:
XXX.XXX.XXX.XX - - [29/Mar/2011:19:40:30 +0000] "GET
Plagiarism? Arguable
Copyright violation? Not at all
Crappy journalism? You bet.
The paper making snide comments reminds me of when Jon Stewart was on Crossfire and they tried accuse Jon's show of being part of the problem. Of course he pointed out the name of the channel his show is on and that his lead in was a show where puppets make prank phone calls. So now we have a supposedly legitimate newspaper publisher commenting about the guy's personal blog. They should have simply provided a link to his site as one of their sources which his web logs prove they went to his site before publishing the article. Big deal it isn't like he was going to get famous from being source linked in that paper's article. Now if he could someone get some real exposure by getting his blog linked to on a big tech site like Slashdot ..... errr, nevermind.
Either that or it is yet another stealth marketing campaign for a yet to be determined product/service.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
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.
...he has it.
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.