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 ..."

crap

[Anonymous Coward]

on top of crap on top of crap.

Great.

[mikkelm]

Ah, Slashdot. Where pointless and petty feuds between nobodies is front page material.

Re:Worst Formatting Ever

[sycomonkey]

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.

Re:Get even!

[gman003]

Step one in that process, of course, being "get on the front page of /."

Re:Get even!

[blankinthefill]

I would think that having a story posted to Slashdot is a pretty good way to go about doing that... .

Re:Great.

[black3d]

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.

Re:Worst Formatting Ever

[Mr. Slippery]

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.

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.

Re:Stating Facts not Plagiarism

[jdpars]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Move along ... nothing to see here folks ...

[the_raptor]

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.

Re:Only one question

[khallow]

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

Re:Only one question

[Permutation Citizen]

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

Re:Stating Facts not Plagiarism

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Or maybe they did their research?

[Moses48]

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.