Press Plagiarist Award of the Year

Guido Fawke's Blog (via BBC via Slashdot) has solicited nominations for Press Plagiarist of the Year Award in a response to journalists lifting articles from blogs and passing them off as their own work in newspapers. Apparently, plagiarism is not limited to academia.

Tech plagiarism

Just a day after his article on not giving credit where due, David Pogue learned that the same observation on Apple's "'Give away the razors, sell a lot of blades' business plan" had been made at least three times going back almost two years. Not citing others, plagiarism in academia, apparently appears more than rarely in newspapers. Perhaps some tech columnists didn't take first-year composition in the university?

Blog content theft

Duncan Riley of The Blog Herald writes about content theft. (This seems to go far beyond plagiarism. Perhaps bloggers need character education?) It seems that quite a few, Duncan says perhaps millions, blogs are using RSS feeds to steal content for posting on their own blogs, at times for profit. In fact, some sites even advertise that ability. Duncan posts this ad from an anonymous site:

Never hire another writer again and always have fresh up to the minute news and articles from your industry on your web pages. Add one line of code to your website and your pages will update themselves forever.

I don't think I'll need to worry about content theft, at least for the near future, but I like one solution posted by Paul Short in a comment to Duncan's entry. He says to add a copyright comment to the content itself:

(C) 2005 Blogherald.com If you’re not reading this in your news aggregator, this material has been stolen. Please contact editor at blogherald.com so we can take immediate legal action.

I imagine that once the thief notices it, they'll just delete it, as Rob Lewis in another comment to the entry said.

Attribution and credibility

David Pogue often has good comments on technology. In the last week, he has had several excellent articles, two on writing.

"Attribution where attribution is due." One was on checking one's sources. Although he cited his source, that source didn't give appropriate credit, perhaps unintentionally, but still it's technically plagiarism. As Pogue said, "Foolish moi!"

"Choosing words carefully." In this article, Pogue had offended the folks at Apple through his choice of words. Pogue concurred. The ability to say one is wrong is great for one's credibility, and note how well he does it with his concluding paragraph:

"In short, if the column’s opening paragraph left anyone with the impression that I believe Apple is somehow coasting on existing technologies, let me set the record straight. Innovation *is* Apple’s heart and soul. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name another company whose fresh technology ideas affect so many lives so often."

Understanding linking

On The Blog Herald, Duncan (via Anne Davis) has an excellent article on the role of links in "building traffic and gaining exposure for your blog." On accomplishing these goals, he makes some recommendations, the last one being,

"And the best of all: Link to others. Lead by example and link to sites and provide credit where credit is due. You’ll find that sometimes you get a link back! There is nothing worse than a blog or blogger that doesn’t give credit on posts where the idea is taken from elsewhere."

The notion of not giving credit resembles that of plagiarism in academia. Perhaps the concept comes to life naturally when ownership of writing is real as opposed to course requirements.

Categories

Categories