Newspaper Plagiarizes Blog, Taunts Real Author 301
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 ..."
Only one question (Score:2)
WTF?
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Someone needs to let this blog writer know that writing an article based on knowledge learned in another article is not plagiarism.
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et tu, jdpars?
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Alas, Poor Yorick, I misquoted him well.
Stating Facts not Plagiarism (Score:2)
Just like writing about Shakespeare and including metaphors interpreted by someone else isn't plagiarism, right?
Wrong. That would be presenting another's ideas as your own. However presenting facts gleaned elsewhere is not plagiarism. So if the article has said words to the effect of "we know they are not real because look they use this stock footage photograph" that is not plagiarism because they are reporting knowledge gained from elsewhere, not someone else's thoughts or ideas. Even if they claim that they discovered the photo is is still not plagiarism - that would just be a lie.
As far as facts are concerned
Re:Stating Facts not Plagiarism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only one question (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [google.com] because it is plagiarism.
The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own
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Writing article about someone's results of their research is kind of plagiarism but quite common, widely accepted and not illegal per copyright law, especially when it's copying factual knowledge and not creations.
OTOH, claiming authorship of the research behind the article is plain assinine.
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Writing article about someone's results of their research is kind of plagiarism but quite common, widely accepted and not illegal per copyright law, especially when it's copying factual knowledge and not creations.
In other words, it is legal plagiarism.
OTOH, claiming authorship of the research behind the article is plain assinine.
Wanting attribution for borrowed content is not asinine IMHO though I can see why someone would disagree. Attribution is pretty much the coinage of the blogging world even if it isn't something shared in the more traditional media.
I see here an interesting sociological anecdote. A blogger is operating on some variant of a gift economy. What I'll call the "interloper" has come in and grabbed the blogger's content without attribution and violated the informal rules of
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Re:Only one question (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on. When you read an article about something you know well, you can judge quality of journalism. Usually it's quite poor.
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I think someone needs to let him know that anyone who thought, even for a moment, that there was really such a thing as a "petite lap giraffe" and was over the age of 12 is a complete idiot who has no business ever writing anything. No-one needed him to point out they were fake.
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Thank god I always use ++i in my loops.
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Sure, but it's not really a newspaper, it's a glorified blog. This was a big win for everybody involved.
If the snarkiness was in the print version of NYT, it would be noteworthy. As is, not much more than a cat fight.
Cooks Source? (Score:5, Funny)
So is this where Judith Griggs, formerly of "Cooks Source" magazine, landed?
Great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, Slashdot. Where pointless and petty feuds between nobodies is front page material.
Re:Great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, but one is a private individual and one is an accountable business. I found it hard to read as well, but was amazed when I got to the part where the newspaper actually does pretend that it wrote the content itself rather than stealing it, and MOCKED the original author for even trying to lay claim to his own work.
A quick domain name lookupwhich is free and public informationwill 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)
For a "professional organisation" that is absolutely incredible. First of all they steal his content. Then they edit it to try and make it look like it wasn't stolen. And then they edit it again to actually make fun of the guy they stole it from.
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The issue isn't that they independently came up with the same fact. The issue is that they stole the fact along with the text that surrounds it then tried to pass it off as their own work by editing the article. Since they edited the article I can't read it as it originally appeared, but if that's what really happened, then yes, they ripped the blog writer off for hist content.
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So, even though you think they did nothing wrong by cribbing from him, they obviou
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Mmm... wonton lifting
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LOL!
Also, lol @ your sig. I've often thought the same. I've decided that it's a trap and if you click it, you never get 15 mod points again. ;)
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Mmm. You know, I could for some wonton lifting right now. The problem is that I always feel like lifting more again in half an hour.
-dZ.
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Do you know anything more nerdy, than two nobodies arguing over pointless details?
I sure as fuck don't.
This is TRUE news for nerds.
Re:Great. (Score:5, Funny)
At the least you could clue us in as to what fame threshold you're looking for in your plagiarism news. I have my account options set to
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i believe the SI unit is milliDianas
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i believe the SI unit is milliDianas
I think they updated to the Sheen since the measurements were more consistent...
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how do i convert to Britneys?
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Sheens are on a logarithm scale, compared to Britneys, so it takes a bit of work... I think wikipedia has an article about it.
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My first reaction was "what the fuck is anyone talking about?".
The plagiarism part, I get. The whole thing about people wondering about some giraffe they saw in some ad I've never seen . . . whatever.
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LULZY newb.
Get even! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Get even! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mmm, ironing. (Score:2)
If a blog takes a newspaper story and rewrites it as their own, it's fair use, but if a newspaper does it....
Re:Mmm, ironing. (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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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. [wikipedia.org] 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.
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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.
Or maybe they did their research? (Score:2)
Why yes, obviously the only place the newspaper could have discovered this is your blog. Nobody involved in as non-technical field as the *press* could ever have heard of whois, or the many web interfaces to that command. You are right in assuming that you are the only person who was curious about this ad campaign to do even the most rudimentary amount of research.
Unless you have logs showing hits from IPs that resolve as being at the paper, I think Occam's Razor applies.
Re:Or maybe they did their research? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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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.
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"Along the same lines, doing a search for Missy Yates will show you that she normally does cooking articles."
Earlier, I was joking about maybe this was Judith Griggs from last year's (similarly petty, rub-it-in-your-face) copyright infringement case in "Cooks Source" magazine. Hmmmm....
THIS is "original research"!? (Score:3)
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?
you're almost right... (Score:2)
The minor detail that you missed is that it's not the newspaper that doesn't get "how the internet works." You're suggesting instead that they learn about plagarism, yet that is - in fact - how the internet works.
Conspiracy Theory? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Not the First Time This Has Happened (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not the First Time This Has Happened (Score:5, Informative)
Unless Missy Yates actually wrote that copy for the Brooklyn Free Store, that's flat out plagarism, unless the BFS lifted it from somewhere else where she had written it, but I suspect that those words come from a press packet distributed by whoever's behind this guy's movie.
And sure enough...
http://www.noimpactdoc.com/about.php
The following copypasta is taken directly from the above mentioned site.
Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year.
It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator. It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, busses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no garbage.
No problem – at least for Colin – but he and his family live in Manhattan. So when his espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping wife Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No Impact Project has an unforeseen impact of its own.
Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein's film provides an intriguing inside look into the experiment that became a national fascination and media sensation, while examining the familial strains and strengthened bonds that result from Colin and Michelle’s struggle with their radical lifestyle change.
So either Yates wrote the above copy and recycled it at LIP, or she's a you-know-what-ist.
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Feedback! (Score:2)
Public backlash only happens when the part of the public who matters know about it.
OMGWTFSANDWICH (Score:3)
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.
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Right! I see why NO ONE in their right minds would link to that blog!
Jesus! Hire a freaking designer,
Re:Worst Formatting Ever (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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When I look at the blog, it's black text on a white background, fixed width, centered.
White backgrounds are bad. Nothing in nature is every such a bright white, and your eyes really don't handle it well. Using a light grey background like CC or DD is much better for preventing eye strain from long term use. Dark (but not black) backgrounds with light (but not white) text is even better, but is generally recommended against as it can be more difficult for users with vision problems to read. The only problem with non-white backgrounds is that it wastes a lot of ink if the site does not hav
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It's not the simplicity that's the problem. For me, it's the lack of white space in relation to the massive font size. Make the font smaller, and space the 'paragraphs' out a little bit more. Also, it could stand to be a little wider... on my screen he could easily fit three columns of the article's size on the screen. He still has plenty of horizontal white space to work with; he should use it. Just my $.02
You can fix it yourself... Hold down your control key and scroll your mouse wheel... fixed right up for you.
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Massive font size? First thing I did upon opening the page was zoom way in.
You insensitive clods with your perfect vision...
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Personally, these days, I kind of prefer a lot of the simpler and narrower width sites with larger fonts. They become a lot more usable on small touch screens without having to worry much about different layouts for different devices.
Of course, many sites have no business being visited on small screen devices.
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Actually that's just his piss poor writing. He quotes them twice showing the changes but on first glance you will think he's comparing his story to theirs. If you read each their isn't a single thing the same but the facts of the story. Note this is the third story the newspaper has done on the Giraffes.
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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
Re:Worst Formatting Ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"Does it create an ethical obligation, in an journalistic or academic context where citing sources of information is important?"
In an academic context, maybe, maybe not. If he's not the original source of the fact, you're free to - in fact, encouraged to - check out the same sources and refer to those directly.
In a journalistic context, no way. Just as you have zero ethical obligation to refer to a newspaper story that first got you the idea for a blog post.
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is this the strangest slashdot troll we've seen here?
or is it proof that microsoft really has the subtlety of a grenade in a primary school classroom? if their search logic is this useless there's no way in hell i'm ever using Bing, even if it does give me the exact (ie stolen) result that google gives...
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No, but you can copyright content. Such as this post for instance. It's now copyrighted. It can be quoted - that falls within fair use. However it's illegal for you to take my post and claim it as your own work.
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Copyright 2011 hellop2
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You can't copyright, trademark, or patent a fact. This guy is being ridiculous.
True, but you can copyright a story, and when a newspaper copies a story word for word without citation, it is plagiarism. In the newspaper biz, it's a big deal.
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But that's not what happened here.
You're right. I misunderstood the complaint. The way he told it, it sounded like they copied him verbatim, which would be a no-no. However, they took his research, validated it themselves, and paraphrased him. Still, a word of acknowledgement would not have been out of order.
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He would be acting in a ridiculous manner if he had mentioned taking legal action at any point in the blog post. He didn't. He is merely pointing out the newspaper's unethical actions.
There is nothing ridiculous about saying, "hey, you copied my research, could you at least give me a link back?"
I mean, what do you expect him to do? Roll over and take it without comment? On a blog? Those guys will carefully annotate their most recent dump if they think it'll bring in readers.
Re:Attention Whore. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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You might want to tone down the libel yourself.
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the truth is an absolute defense for Libel and the guy is a Dumbass so i think im ok.
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The truth is a defense for libel, but you have to prove that you're posting the truth. I don't think that you can do that, because the article definitely does not reflect what you've said.
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Proof
This guy has no basis for his claims.(the only similarity between the two articles is the topic covered)
The newspaper however does have a rock solid case for Libel.( he accused them of Plagiarism which isn't true(see above))
Dumbass.(see any page on his blog)
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The guy stated what he believes to be the truth too. And the evidence is piling up that you're a stupid piece of shit, so I'll go ahead and claim that as truth until you prove otherwise.
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IAAL; this is ridiculous. The presentation was not taken. All this guy is complaining about are the facts.
I have to call up to what someone else above said, there is no legal obligation on the newspaper's part here, but that doesn't mean that there is no ethical or moral obligation.
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Honestly, there might be some SLIGHT moral obligation to give him credit, but it's not even that strong. Finding/figuring out a fact first doesn't give you some right to that fact. Newspaper reporters will get information from each other all the time.
Consider an investigative report though... if one news source took the facts and such from that report and presented it as their own, without really kind of indicating that someone else is doing it, it seems just kind of bad form to me.
However, arguing moral obligations and such are pretty much nearly impossible... all we can argue is that there should have been a note in a bibliography... and there is little that actually means anyways... journalists don't usually publish bibliographies.
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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 a
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Newspaper journalists typically get those stories off the AP wire service, something which the paper pays for and contributes to in order to use the content. Typically you'll see at the top of such stories a byline crediting the AP as the source.
TV and Radio is a little different, I'm not familiar enough to know how they handle or don't handle that situation.
Re:Move along ... nothing to see here folks ... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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but if the alleged offender omits the lies, you're case is over
That's clever introducing an error that will be identifiable when someone reposts your +4 comment on the next article about plagiarism.
Re:Move along ... nothing to see here folks ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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
Re:Move along ... nothing to see here folks ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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"So, no copyright infringement (at even the most generous definition of the word) and no plagerism."
(a) You seem to not realize that there's a distinction between "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement".
(b) You seem to be unable to even spell "plagiarism".
So I would say that your expertise on the subject is suspect.