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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Despite Parker’s denial, many in the crossword world see willful plagiarism in Parker’s puzzles, and they see the database that revealed the repetition as a tool of justice. “It’s like a murder mystery solved 50 years later with DNA evidence,” Matt Gaffney, a professional crossword constructor, told me.

There's a response to postmodernism that says "reality is that which, when you ignore it, doesn't go away".

I have a hard time seeing this as a "scandal"; it's firmly in the class of things that aren't a problem unless someone tells you you have a problem. A murder has victims. But if you're unhappy that the crossword puzzle you solved last week was secretly a rerun from 10 years ago, it's not obvious whether the blame for your unhappiness should go to the guy who reran the puzzle, or the guy who told you it was a rerun.

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I don't think it's the rerunning that's the problem, but the misattribution, claiming others' work as their own or denying them credit (and presumably royalties).

If the originality of the crossword has no value, why would it matter whether someone's claim that it is original is true or false? The most logical basis for attributing value to the claim of originality is that there is value in the originality that bleeds through to the claim.

Compare e.g. someone being jailed for resisting arrest when there was no justification for arresting him in the first place.

Sorry... what? Why would you say the originality of the crossword has no value? And what on earth does that have to do with resisting arrest?

The law tends to disagree: crossword puzzles are copyrightable material just like any other published text is, so their value comes from the material that they help sell, whether that's a newspaper, or a crossword puzzle book, or a website, or any other published, in the legal sense, work.

But misattribution is not a problem at all in that analysis. It's just as illegal to violate a copyright with proper attribution as it is if I claim the work is my own.

The law doesn't care whether you claim a copyrighted work is yours or not. It cares whether, if you copy a copyrighted work, you have the license to do so.

I wouldn't really see the players as victims, but A) crossword constructors are potentially having their work ripped off and/or receiving less work and B) Uclick/USA Today are paying someone to do something when they could have just rerun old puzzles and got a similar result. A comparison to a murder investigation is maybe a bit much, but I can see where people are coming from.

it should not be summed up as a comparison to a murder investigation, but rather as a a comparison to DNA evidence.

> "reality is that which, when you ignore it, doesn't go away".

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

If you’re unhappy after someone told you you worked a rerun crossword puzzle, maybe blame yourself? The only thing changing is your interpretation of your own experiences.

I was confused by this response, because it appears to just repeat the content of my original comment.

Now I'm more confused that my comment was upvoted and this was downvoted.

I'm guessing it's because you said it in an indirect way, and I said it directly. And people don't like being told that their gut feelings and outrage are only in their own head. I'm never really sure which is the right way to approach people -- the indirect approach goes over some people's heads sometimes (like me, a little this time) but the direct approach often gets outright rejected from confirmation bias. Teaching is hard, man.

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