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Comment by sachitgupta | Hacker News Reader

Josh Linker, author of the Fast Company piece, responded in the comments:

  "Hi Chris.  Josh Linkner here, the author of this piece @ Fast Company.  
  I owe you a HUGE apology!!  A friend of mine sent me that
  excerpt and I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's so
  I didn't attribute it when I wrote my post.  As an author,
  VC, and entrepreneur I hold myself to the highest standards
  and I'm deeply sorry this happened.  Will correct and cite
  you ASAP. Again, honest mistake and I'm sorry it happened.
  Happy to chat further if you'd like - www.JoshLinkner.com"

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If you didn't write it and don't cite a source, it's plagiarism. Doesn't matter if a friend sent it to you in email -- that just means you plagiarized a friend, which is kinda worse actually.

It's really hard for me to see this as an "honest mistake"; it just seems more like your average, run-of-the-mill, laziness-induced plagiarism.

And in the age of Google, where you can just put quotes around the first sentence and find the original source, it shows a complete lack of care.

Once Google indexes Borges' Library of Babel, though, you will find that any sentence is already used, and every article is already written.

On a more serious note: it would be interesting to add a check to CMS systems to automatically look up all sentences in an article before submitting and apply information theory to compute a "plagiarism" coefficient. No doubt these kind of systems already exist to detect student plagiarism.

The software should already be there, I've seen it mentioned many times over the years.

If one of those software producers would provide an API (something similar to Automattic's Akismet for spam) I'm sure there's money to be made in selling that service outside the academic realm.

Indeed, my university uses a service called Turnitin to rate the percentage of coursework that is plagiarised, along with giving where from etc.

It's pretty nice actually, can recognise when things are quoted and not passed off as your own.

My high school actually used this too - my teacher once showed my a sample report, and it was actually very good at detecting plagiarism even with words changed, sentence order mildly munged, etc. (with percentage probabilities). They seem to have a fairly good model of what kind of changes writers make when copying material.

Good point! Specifically, reputable journalistic outfits should implement a policy of running their materials through TurnItIn before publishing. This would allow editorial control over plagiarism. Any journalists want to comment on whether or not this is existing policy and why?

If you have to have your writers run their material through something to make sure they're not stealing it from somewhere else, shouldn't hire them in the first place. Really, most journalists would never do this.

We run our writer's material through spell checkers and grammar editing. We run it through fact checking processes. In theory, a good writer would never need any of these, but in the real world it is a useful step. If we do THESE things, then why not a step that requires nearly no effort (just use an automated tool) and which WOULD catch some cases that have affected even major publications with excellent reputations?

Kudos on owning up to a big mistake, but the story about merely quoting a friend seems incredibly thin.

I agree. If he had no idea what the source was, why quote it? Why not go back and ask?

Yeah, because Googling for a quoted piece of the text is soo hard?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22Angry+Birds+was+Rovio%E2%80%99s%C2%A...

In addition to deserving that huge apology, Dixon deserves monetary compensation from Josh Linkner. Words don't write themselves, and so Linkner had to realize he was using someone else's work without permission -- even if he didn't know who authored the work he was plagiarizing. Linkner only cares because he was caught red-handed. If I was Dixon I would seek statutory damages without question.

Read the law: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

> I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's

So, who did he think wrote it? It had to be someone's.

Would of being nice if he just apologized without the story about highest standards and a "friend".

PR 101. Just apologize, as simply as your lawyer will let you. Don't complicate the issue, or netizens will dissect everything you say, which just drags the crisis out.

A journo should know better.

The problem is, people try to justify themselves. Real sleaze-balls probably don't care, but normal people (who may have screwed up a bit) always try to blame someone else. I would. It's bad PR though.

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