Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism
vqronline.org
vqronline.org
The publisher's PR team was on this faster than you can say media disaster. Get "Oops, I goofed" out there as quickly as possible while shifting blame to someone or something else (software, confusion over citation format, whatever).
If this happened to one of Anderson's own writers at Wired, I suspect he or she would be out of a job just as quickly.
Besides, we're gearing up to blow the Taste of Chicago out of the water this weekend.
Example: there's someone out there who can explain why Daley flopped on the Olympic guarantee - did he want to? Pretty clearly no. Did he have to? Pretty clearly yes. But, instead, we get more of the same "oh, that Daley, he shits on the city".
The issue is - will people work for free for someone else? As far as I can tell, the only community doing that online is at DailyKos. Am I wrong?
Now, look, Doris Kearns Goodwin got nailed plagarizing, too. She did her penance, and now she's back on TV and everything after putting out Team of Rivals, which was seminal. Anderson will have to do something similar.
What's striking is that if you make it to the top of the profession, you can get away with this. If you're 28 and toiling to work your way up, it's a death sentence.
Given that, I find Anderson's screwup with footnotes no more objectionable than the critic's self-interested attempt to drum up a scandal out of it. It's not like the book gains anything by not citing a few Wikipedia articles; given its genre (popular economics) it would in fact be more convincing with them than without them. If it were claiming original scholarship it would be a different story.
Anyway, my point isn't really to defend authorial sloppiness in shallow throwaway bestsellers. I just didn't like the bait-and-switch in the gotcha piece. (Or its self-importance. "Investigation?" Please.)
Edit: ok, my conscience made me go back and reread the VQR piece to see if it was all that obnoxious. And it says it wasn't really and I have to add that here. In a footnote. :)
When were "they" markedly better?
Aren't the executives more to blame here?
The MSM does seem to be getting worse to me, but this might be an optical illusion - an effect of the contrast with how much better its emerging replacement is.
Seems like you could catch a lot of plagiarism by doing a sentence-by-sentence google search of a submitted work. Probably against Google's ToS but it would probably turn up a lot of dirt.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...
If you violate the condition, then you have no permission to use. Then, since you've used without permission, the copyright holder can sue you for damages, and/or to stop/mitigate the violation.
The copyright holder might propose that relicensing your work under copyleft/ShareAlike would be sufficient penance for them to settle. But it's not automatic -- "you used X, thus your work in now licensed as X demanded".
Maybe he didn't want that... I don't understand really, did he think no one would find out? What is his response? I looked on thelongtail.com but don't see anything.
Anderson's response is quoted at the end of the article.
Roughly he says: "Whoops, we copied it by mistake, it should have been quoted or rewritten. We'll correct online and in future printings."
It doesn't in any way change his copyright/license. (He may very well offer the book for free, given his schtick, but there's no automatic compulsion to. And if you copied his work without permission, you couldn't argue "but he did the same thing" or "he accidentally gave me permission".)
If you create a book compilation of "Wikipedia's greatest hits", then you're stuck releasing the book as ShareAlike or negotiating with the copyright holder(s).
If you write a book about a particular topic and you use excerpts, quotes, or ideas from Wikipedia (and properly cite them), that's fair use. I'm sure there's some sort of ceiling on that (IANAL) which prevents you from copy+paste-ing broad swaths of text into your work and "citing" it.
The key is the citation, which is where the author screwed up. If you're using text/ideas from a particular source and not citing that source, then you're not covered under fair use and are obliged to follow whatever licensing system the original author wishes.
What's to stop any author from saving themselves hours/weeks/years of effort by simply by copying text and sticking a citation at the end of the paragraph, as it appears was done in this case?
Now, if the book is 99% other people's work, but all copying is cited, you might still run afoul of copyright laws for copying without permission. But it won't be plagiarism. Whether 'fair use' applies depends on a test where many factors are weighed. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Very roughly, the idea is: does your use add value for society without damaging the value of the original work? Using less is better than using more. Using for educational/nonprofit uses is better than trying to make a quick buck. Trying to make a buck in a new transformative way is better than trying to make a buck at the expense of (by replacing) the original work in the marketplace. Using just enough to have a conversation about the work, adding your commentary, is better than just reusing the juicy parts to save yourself effort. Etc.