Plagiarism and Bloggers
The other day Slashdot pointed to a rather misguided critique of bloggers as plagiarists. The writer contends in “The New Plagiarism” that bloggers who “blockquote” and cite their sources are still plagiarists.
These sites, which for this article I’ll simply call “gray”, are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.
This has caused many bloggers to worry that these grey blogs might be trying to get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution. The idea being that they can create a much larger volume of content if they only have to write a small portion of it. Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source. After all, they already have most of the critical information.
I think the author has gotten the whole idea of copyright infringement (a legal problem) mixed with plagiarism (not a legal problem, but an academic one). Regardless, what he fails to observe is that the “original sources” very much wind up being unknown to the casual readers, and blogs actually drive traffic to site, not diminish it. The Guardian Unlimited, for example, is an award winning newspaper site that gets cited in blogs and Wikipedia and has increased their exposure far beyond their print circulation in the UK. In my years of dealing with newspapers around the world, I have heard very few gripes from newspaper folks about their work being cited in chunks across the net. In fact, the Wall Street Journal looks favorably upon their reporters when their stories are cited by others.
May 24th, 2006 04:55
First off, if you read the article, you see that I never called bloggers plagiarists. In fact, if you read the update, which is mentioned at the top of the article and posted at the end, you’ll see that I only used the term plagiarism at all as a hat tip to a pair of articles that inspired me to write it. Throughout the piece I used the terms copyright infringement, content theft and reuse.
Also, contrary to what many may think, this isn’t a campaign against quoting. Far from it. If you notice, I use a Creative Commons License on my work, including that one.
It was targeted at a very, very small subset of bloggers, far less than one percent, that get almost all of their content in quote format and do it in ways that don’t encourage readers to visit original sources.
Many people have taken this issue personally even though they shouldn’t.
Thank you very much for your time.
May 24th, 2006 07:04
Jonathan, point taken.
Though if you have a post called “The New Plagiarism” on a site called “PlagiarismToday” and the first graf says “…Dan Zarella from Puritan City call those who engage in it ‘the best plagiarists’. Others simply call them bloggers or, as Zarella also put it, ‘Human Aggregators’…” then you can’t really fault readers for thinking your angle is to at least insinuate that that plagiarism is part of the issue. But let’s put that aside.
There are problems with the vague term you use - “content theft.” It is not something defined legally (see the Dan Brown case in the UK) nor is it something widely used in academia (while the term plagiarism is).
Some consider “fair use” a form of “content theft” even though it is well established in the US sense. (It is less so in the Commonwealth’s concept of fair dealing.) So I wonder if that is the issue you have, with content block-quoted and attributed, but somehow the copyright owner being able to exercise more restrictions over the use of their content? Is it a fundamental objection to the whole idea of fair use (or fair dealing) that you are contending?
May 24th, 2006 07:30
I’m sorry if my hurried comment seemed hars, there’s no attempt to blame readers. The mistake was my own. I am the writer, I have the responsibility to be clear.
I am working on a revised version of the article that is much more clear and concise. Hwoever, I’m going to wait to post it until after the attention has died down. I deserve much of the heat I’ve drawn for not being clear and don’t want to shirk responsibility.
Still, I wanted to make sure that misconceptions regarding the article are addressed. I don’t want to unfairly crucified as something I am not because I wasn’t clear.
As far as the term content theft goes, it’s important to note that this isn’t a legal blog. It deals with some legal issues, but isn’t written for lawyers.
In regards to fair use, I have no objection to fair use at all. I often don’t think that fair use goes far enough. However, some blogs, a very small percentage, go well beyond the bounds of what is considered fair use and repost large blogs of articles with very little original text, founding their entire blog on other people’s content, often for commercial gain.
That’s all. In truth, the article has an extremely narrow focus…