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 ..."
Worst Formatting Ever (Score:1, Informative)
That was so impossible to read, I didn't even bother.
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:Mmm, ironing. (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:Mmm, ironing. (Score:1, Informative)
No, attribution is not required for fair use.
If there is a source, Attribution/credit of the source is required for it to not be plagiarism.
The article is not about copyright law; it's about professional misbehavior by journalists.
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.
Not the First Time This Has Happened (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.