Ask HN: Techcrunch plagiarized my article...what can/should I do?

I'm sorry, what?

You mention 150 clones, they say 800. You mention 100k people in reference to one particular occasion at one particular school. They mention 50k people and don't mention the same occasion, even though they mention the same school. They mention a mob mentality, the closest you have is "flash-mob deals," whatever that means. You mention the importance of a vibrant college town, they say nothing of the sort. You talk about other services likely to pop up. They focus just on Campus Dibs. They mention alumni, you don't.

What exactly do you feel they plagiarized? I don't see a single similar element between the quotes you gave except overall topic.

I agree. I definitely don't see any basis for claiming that this article was plagiarized.

TC wrote a similar article with similar points, that doesn't mean that they stole from you.

For example, I wrote:

These are places where populations can change dramatically (think Game Day at Penn State when 100,000+ people come to see a football game) and could take flash-mob deals to a whole new level. Look out for daily deals on campus at schools with large student bodies and a vibrant college town"

She basically changed "populations can change dramatically" and "large student bodies" to "fanatical" and vibrant to "hopping"...not to mention almost the exact same list of college towns + her alma mater

But these ideas could easily be reached independently. It seems to me that anyone who sat and thought about how a campus-based Groupon clone could succeed would follow this line of thought.

Just because bats can fly doesn't mean they evolved from birds.

Sorry, I know it's fun to rail on TC, but I'm not sure I see the blatant plagiarism that you do. It's definitely not word-for-word, and while the concept is the same, I'm not sure that proves anything.

Aside from whether they did plagiarize your article, there's pretty much nothing you can do. Even if they had cut and pasted your article verbatim, I doubt you could do much other than maybe email some other bloggers with an axe to grind against TC and see if they'd throw some gas on the fire for you. But with something this vague? Good luck :-/

Wikipedia defines plagiarism as: "the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work"

it doesn't have to be verbatim. even if she got some bit of inspiration from me, when in doubt she should source her story.

i agree that i can't really do anything, which is why I'm asking HN...

The generally accepted definition of plagiarism is Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

Even if they recycled your "idea" they didn't do it consistently enough to constitute plagiarism en masse and your basic idea isn't unique enough to really warrant attribution.

false. seriously read the wikipedia entry.

I get that it doesn't have to be verbatim, but it seems pretty vague to me. I think you're wasting your time. What outcome do you really want here? Why did you write the post in the first place?

The fact is she presented the ideas as her own...and since it was covered on SAI, and I sent the blog post to them as well, asking if they would like me to provide the excel doc, they were definitely aware of the article.

I'm not trying to burn Alexia, Arrington, or TC, but I think she conveyed my ideas as her own, and would think she'd source her idea...

I wrote the article as my own analysis of the Gap Groupon campaign because I'm fascinated with local commerce (last website I built was a local events finder -- deadpooled, but http://www.prximity.com)

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as "the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

I do not see this as plagiarism. They might have read your article and used it as one of many facets to their own but does not look like plagiarism.

In school they always taught us that if you read something to influenced the final piece, you should source it (else you are plagiarism.

Now, journalism is not held to high standards for this sort of thing, especially tech journalism.

"used it as one of many facets" IS plagiarism....

No. Not really.

No it's not.

It looks more like the article used your article as source material. This is the kind of neo-plagiarism we deal with - it's more sophisticated than word-by-word copying, but the ideas are a total ripoff. If you're going to 'loosely paraphrase' a source, you should cite it.

exactly -- it's still plagiarism.

I can't tell you what you can do, but I can tell you what you should do - absolutely nothing. Life's too short, and you'll be happier and more productive by letting it go.

thanks <sigh>

You are complaining that they used your article as a source for theirs - but that's not really plagiarism.

"Steal from one person, that's plagiarism. Steal from many, that's research"

I don't think that you're going to gain anything by kicking up a fuss about this in public. Much better to respond to them quietly and try and get retro-active attribution. But they don't need to do that, and they haven't done anything particularly evil, novel or noteworthy by taking your article and writing it in their own words. I think that you're over-reacting to something that happens a lot in modern fast-paced journalism. You may not like it, but I think that it is normal and accepted so you must either work with TC and ask if they would like to syndicate some of the stuff that you write in the future, write-off the incident as a life lesson or stop writing easily rephraseable articles...

thank you for the advice.

Learn from your own story. A blog is like Groupon, easy to clone.

My metric for plagiarism is pretty strict: is the article fundamentally different because the author read your article? Thus, whether it was copied word-for-word is irrelevant. They could change every word, they could even change ideas and concepts - if they drew inspiration from your article and didn't cite it, they've committed plagiarism.

Now, with that said, while it's definitely possible that this happened, can you even prove that the author read your article? If you can't prove that they were influenced - and it certainly isn't obvious from what they wrote - then there's little to nothing you can do about it, because no one else can be certain that any plagiarism did occur. In fact, neither can you, so be careful because you're leveling a pretty serious accusation with no proof.

So then your post is plagiarism since you don't site your English teachers? Your post is fundamentally different because they taught you English. Of course it isn't, "close imitation" is the key. Then where does close become too close?

She probably did copy the examples, I doubt two independent people would come up with the exact same list of examples unless both plagiarized from a third source.

In my analysis, I did a google search for "colleges by student population" and got this as the top link: http://www.happyschoolsblog.com/largest-us-universities-by-s....

The list was created from 2006 data. One thing to notice, I skipped over Texas A&M and University of South Florida and picked up Penn State (because I'm from Jersey, and half of my high school went there).

The TC article article also omits these two schools, and adds in UCLA and USC. (The author is a USC grad herself.) Even if she did find the same list, why also skip over A&M and USF?

a more accurate list would have come from more recent data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_colleges_...

Yes, it's possible, but I think pretty unlikely she'd independently decide to drop the same two schools that I did, assuming she found the same source.

I sent my article to TC (via tips on website, or else I would screenshot) the same day that SAI syndicated my post.

And, on Sept 3 one of the co-founders even referenced my article again...so the founders were actively talking about it.

http://twitter.com/scottpony/status/22894399146

No, not really. Sorry, but I don't see any plagiarism here. They read like two quite different write-ups of the same concept.

Are you using TC name for your own free PR? It look like it to me.

Have you asked them about it?

i @replied Alexia and Arrington -- but it's 7am and I don't expect a response for hours.

Then why bring it up here so soon? At least wait for a response :/

to be honest, i didn't even think HN would notice...i came here for advice, and that's what i've gotten.

Not a day goes by when I don't see some no-name blog or other scraping a post of mine word-for-word. That's plagiarism. Unless there's more to it, this complaint seems entirely without merit.

it doesn't have to be verbatim. like olliecromwell said, if it's loosely paragraphed, it should be cited

Paraphrased, not paragraphed. And while it would be nice if it were cited, it's not plagiarism as I understand it. You don't have a leg to stand on.

Sorry you have no complaint here..

Clickable:

Mine:

http://entreprenormal.com/post/1009185254/where-oh-where-sho...

http://www.businessinsider.com/where-should-your-groupon-clo...

TC's: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/campusdibs/