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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 ..."
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.
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?
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
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
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
Come on. When you read an article about something you know well, you can judge quality of journalism. Usually it's quite poor.
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