Great Minds

This syndicated cartoon by Jeff Danziger is dated March 12 and appeared online and in the Washington Post yesterday:

It looks familiar. Where have I seen it before? Oh, yeah. On the March 8 post of Dowd Report:


Note that Danziger didn't have the gumption to draw the iconic red polka-dotted bandanna that appears in the original poster onto Michelle.

Now I'm not accusing Danziger of plagiarism because the idea is too obvious. Unbeknowst to me, at least one commenter on a political blog made the suggestion (without executing the idea) before I had posted my version. Besides, based on the number of views Dowd Report gets, it's unlikely that he was one of the couple of hundred people to even see that post even though, thanks to some third party links from commenters on HuffPo and DailyKos, it was one of the most popular posts in the history of the blog.

Still, I'm amused that I had the same concept as a famous syndicated cartoonist a week ahead of him. Great minds think alike. I don't know what my excuse is.

Graceland: Going, Going, Gone

A couple of years back I was passing through Memphis and I made the Elvis pilgrimage to Graceland. I took a bunch of pictures and made a slideshow set to music. Rather than going with an Elvis song like other nearly identical slideshows, I used Paul Simon's "Going to Graceland". That's about as creative as I get. It’s been a moderately successful video by my standards with over 5,000 views. Hardly Chocolate Rain territory, but I’m proud of it.

Now, over two years after I posted the video, I got this notice from YouTube:

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video Going To Graceland. The audio content identified in your video is Graceland by Paul Simon. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

YouTube offered a link to a service they have called AudioSwap that has thousands of fully licensed alternative tracks that they can hot-swap out with the original audio. After a little keyword searching, I found a tune called “Elvis (Was Bigger Than The Beatles)” by Supergarage that was not only on-topic, but nearly the exact same length as my video. Here is the newly updated version with the great new soundtrack:



I originally posted that video with a song from my personal library knowing full well that I was violating the copyright of the song as well as the YouTube terms of service. I have also been known to occasionally travel at speeds in excess of the posted legal speed limit.

I got caught, got busted, and paid my penalty. I’m actually grateful for YouTube’s AudioSwap service because a four and a half minute slide show without a soundtrack is pretty miserable.

What does rankle me is that if you do a search for “Paul Simon Graceland” you will quickly stumble onto this video:



It is clearly a ripped DVD performance of a live performance. It also has over 230,000 views. How does my video catch the attention of the record company copyright trawlers and this one escapes their notice? Perhaps the guy that posted it has some arrangement with Paul Simon or his record company. Or maybe he’s next on the list. I just don’t know.

I respect and appreciate the intellectual property system, but I’m baffled by the random and chaotic enforcement that seems aimed at harassing and frustrating the casual fan and the hobbyist YouTube user. The most famous travesty is one where a takedown notice came to a lady that had filmed 30 seconds of her toddler bouncing to a barely audible Prince song. My case, where I clearly used the full song, is far less ambiguous, but it still strikes me as oddly petty on the part of the record companies. There has to be a better way, I’m just not smart enough to figure it out.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: So what do you think of the Supergarage song?

Welcome Achenblog Readers

Joel Achenbach was kind enough to link to my blog today, but he's not too savvy with the permalinks (bless his little old media heart). The articles he is referring to are:

Begging Forgiveness
and
Asking Permission
in that order. Just hit the back button after reading each and you will be returned here. If you want to read more of my intermittent ramblings on intellectual property, check out the plagiarism tag.

This post will self-destruct in 36 hours.

Asking Permission

This post is a sequel to Begging Forgiveness.

I like a little visual interest on my blog posts. I usually add at least one graphic just to interrupt the huge block of my babbling underneath the title. I also like to use my own work if possible. If I have a photo even remotely related to the topic, I will use that. My Times Square Flag Still Flies post was mostly inspired by the fact that I did have a picture of the building that got bombed and it creeped me out a little bit that you never know when and where news will occur. For my Gary Gygax eulogy, I went and took a picture of my own D&D dice rather than find a stock image and I wove the distressing condition of the dice into the story.

Other posts of mine like where I mock celebrities I use commonly available publicity shots of my objects of scorn. I really have no qualms about using these photos which, while not in the public domain, are clearly in the public sphere. Since I’m usually snarking about something, I feel I can mount a pretty decent “review and comment” or “satire” defense. At least in my own mind. Nobody’s ever called me on it and Ces is actually impressed with my signs of creepily obsessive devoted fandom.

But some topics need a visual clue that I don’t have, so I go Googling. For my follow-up D&D post where, according to the quiz, I’m an elf wizard. I did a Google Image search and in the first page of results, was this terrific image (click on the link, it really is just perfect) which came from the blog of DPI Studios. I downloaded the image to my hard drive and then uploaded it to Blogger.com. Since Blogger (which is owned by Google) has nearly unlimited storage, I feel better and safer doing that rather than deep-linking to the original image. I have some scruples.

When you do that, the link on the image in the post goes to the full size source stored on the Blogger server. This can be easily edited to redirect wherever I want. What I did with the elf was link the image to the source blogpost of DPI. At the bottom of the post I also included a link to their main homepage. I don’t usually include explicit image credits, but I thought these guys merited it.

Having just been burned on the Rock Album Meme photo guy going ballistic, I decided to do the decent thing and send one of the image owners an alert that I had used their illustration that they had posted on the web where anybody could find it. I phrased the e-mail so that if they never responded, I could assume it was okay with them:

I have a blog and wrote about Dungeons and Dragons and needed an image of an elf wizard. I found your site through a Google search and downloaded to my own server (actually Blogger.com's) an image you recently created. I have credited DPI Studios and linked the image to your blog.

Please let me know if this is not an acceptable use of your artwork. Thanks for your cooperation.

But they did reply. And they seemed a little puzzled that I even bothered to ask, but they didn’t like the idea.

Yeah, I really wish you would have contacted us before you put that up. Since that piece was done for Green Ronin Publishing we can't give you permission to use it. I feel bad having put it up with out a Green Ronin copyright notice, I'll have to change that.

Thanks for your interest in our work and thanks for asking permission.

They were kind enough to suggest some other images, and I did replace the original one with one of the “permission granted” alternatives, but it wasn’t quite as perfect a match.

Most of the time when I “steal’ an image it’s from a website that clearly didn’t create it but got it from someplace else themselves (like the Google Search image I put on this post for purely prurient purposes). When, like the fine folks at DPI Studios, it’s clearly original artwork, I think it’s only right to link back to the source and credit the heck out of it.

I’m still not sure about the whole issue of whether it’s easier to beg forgiveness or ask permission. I do a blog post a day somewhere and to wait around for a reply granting permission for an image when I don’t even have an example of what I intend to do with it seems like a prescription for rejection. I think I will continue to figure this out on a case by case basis. And if I’ve used something of yours on my blog, just let me know and we can discuss it reasonably.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you put images on your blog, and if you do, where do you get them?

Begging Forgiveness

On of the funnest and most popular memes I did recently was the Rock Album Cover meme that combined a band name, an album title and a Flickr image for a cover. The image is taken from a group of highly rated photos. Most of these pictures are from professional photographers and carry a copyright. The photo that got selected for me was by Roland Lacson of rlphotography. About a month after I posted the meme, I got this message through Flickrmail:

This has been brought to my attention, so I'll be civil here & hope you understand that I have every right as to the reason for this message. This is in regards to MY Image ( River Rocks #4) you posted on your site @ blogspot.com W/O MY PERMISSION! I don't appreciate it & am disturbed. Taking into account that at least you had the decency of crediting me, I'm still disappointed that you disregarded what I clearly & specifically stated on my profile, I mean were adults here so just put yourself in my shoes...

Sure enough. On his profile page is this disclaimer:

ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHTED, PLEASE DO NOT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION...

Not a lot of ambiguity there and I’m definitely in the wrong here. I sent back this apology and explanation:

I apologize for my unauthorized use of your copyrighted image. I have removed the image from the blogpost in question.

Intellectual property rights and the protection of creative work in the digital age are frequent themes on my blog and I was wrong to use your image without seeking your permission.

I used it as part of an internet “blog meme” where bloggers made mock-ups of fictitious album covers as a creative exercise. Your picture was randomly chosen from a pool of the highest rated images on Flickr, of which you should be rightly proud. I and several of my readers and fellow bloggers expressed concern that the “rules” of this game tended to select possibly infringing images. At least one other participant found a way to do the task by only using images available under a Creative Commons license that allow non-commercial derivative work.

My only rationalization (and it is pretty weak) is that my use of your work has no commercial value to you, me, or any third part and can’t possibly have affected any potential revenue for you. I would like to know how you became aware of my blog and if you would have done so if it weren’t for my clear crediting of your work.

I realize that I have destroyed any potential goodwill between us by not asking your permission in advance, but I would like to restore the image to that one blogpost as credited under the clear understanding that it remains your intellectual property. Please let me know if this is acceptable to you.

You did ask me to put myself in your shoes. I am a hobbyist photographer and blogger and make no money from my publicly posted pictures and written works. I have, on admittedly rare occasion, been asked for permission to use my works on other websites (and in one case a printed book) and have always granted permission provided I am credited and linked to. I understand that your standing as a professional artist would cause you to have a different reaction to circumstances under which I would have been flattered rather than outraged.

He replied with this:

Appreciate the gesture & I accept your apology. Regardless of usage be it commercial or non, it is common courtesy to seek permission for something that does not belong to you, by nature I have no problem if my image is used as long as I'm asked first & equally important given the info as to what purpose & due credits (Which I Acknowledged), that's all.

So in light of your sincere message, your request to have the image reposted to your blogpost is hereby granted.

I appreciate the cooperation of Mr Larson and have endeavored to follow his advice. It’s not always easy but it is what’s right.

Next Post: Asking Permission

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What would you have done if you were in his shoes?

Plagiarism Police: Savage Sex Stealing

It’s been a long time since I did a Plagiarism Watch, but this story is an excuse to download the accompanying prurient image. The New York Press, a weekly alternative newspaper that is the lamer rival to the famed Village Voice had to fire it’s latest sex advice columnist. It seems that instead of soliciting letters from hapless folk on the web that seem only too eager to air dirty linen, she stole old letters from Dan Savage’s "Savage Love" column. If you are going to steal, be a little more discrete. This is like submitting a John Updike story to the New Yorker. You are going to get caught. See if you can notice the similarities (and see Jezebel for longer quotes):

New York Press, 2007 I'm beginning to be weirded out by her relationship with her brother. They're always touching in each other. Then, one day, I come home and my girlfriend is in her brother's arms on the couch. As soon as I walked in the door, they jumped up, and I saw a clear view of the outline of his boner. They both looked guilty.

Dan Savage in 2006 Two weeks ago I came home and found my girlfriend in her brother's arms on the couch. They freaked at my sudden arrival and jumped up, providing me with a clear view of the outline of the boner in his pants. Guilt was on their faces.

This is a clear case of someone trying to get away with Plagiarism Excuse® #7 (I didn’t copy. I changed a bunch of words.) but the official excuse was closer to #5 (It was a youthful indiscretion.):

She has told us she was unaware that using questions from Savage's column was a breach of journalism ethics. She has offered her resignation, and we've accepted it. We apologize to our readers, and to Dan Savage, for this error in judgment.

In his podcast, Savage Lovecast, Dan has said that one of the most common questions he gets is “How do I get your job?” His answer is to not bother. There is only one of him and he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Out of context that sounds incredibly arrogant, but the germ of truth is that the alt-weekly sex column niche is pretty narrow and if you are going to compete with the market leader, you need to find a better gimmick than just rewriting letters about siblings that are a little too close and the sterility of urine. Dan has officially stayed classy, but he can afford to. In an e-mail to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he says it doesn't quite rise to the level of plagiarism:

"I don't think she did this on purpose," Savage wrote in an e-mail Thursday. "The borrowing was an accident, not malicious, and doesn't rise to the level of plagiarism, in my opinion. She could've avoided this ... if she'd said, 'I don't have any letters yet, so here are some I swiped from 'Savage Love.'' And I would've given her my permission to use 'em."

Now the Press is taking open auditions for their smut advice writer. If I knew it was that easy, I would have gotten into the sex columnist business. Any questions?

Plagiarism Police: Sorkin vs. Spy

I’m a faithful watcher of Alan Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as any reader of this blog can tell since I invented the Studio 60 Drinking Game and held a Studio 60-30 Rock Face Off. I’m also a huge fan of the late lamented Spy magazine having just read and reviewed the coffee table tribute to that snarky pioneer.

This leads to the current case in front of the Plagiarism Police®.

Docket: Aaron Sorkin vs. Spy magazine

Accusation: Lifting fictitious factoids from snarky 90s magazines.

Evidence:

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip "The Christmas Show" by Aaron Sorkin	Spy, January 1991 "The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer" by Bruce Handy et. al.
Matt: They calculated the number of homes with children and the average weight of two presents per child. Danny: What did they find? Matt: He would need 214,200 reindeer pulling a sled weighing 321,000 tons at 3,000 times the speed of sound.	This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons… We need 214,200 reindeer.

Defense: None, he has never been called on this before I just brought it up. My guess is that he would use Yellojkt Plagiarist Excuse® #4. The original Spy magazine article has been widely distributed on the internet with and without attribution. It is so you-biquitous that it merits its own Snopes page.

Closing arguments: If you are going to quote faux-facts, you should at least copy the source correctly. The article assumes two-pounds of presents, not two presents per kid. Sorkin in general plays so fast and loose with his factoids that nobody really expects him to acknowledge his sources. According to some, he barely acknowledges his co-writers.

Verdict: Dismissed for lack of interest.

Sentence: Community service is recommended. Give us more original sub-plots like the New Orleans jazz tribute and fewer ad hominem attacks on the bloggers and the internet that are Sorkin’s uncredited cowriters.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What have you seen suspiciously cribbed from the internet?

Plagiarism Police: McEwan vs. Andrews

Earlier this week, the Achenblog had a very wide ranging discussion about plagiarism accusations against Ian McEwen and his book Atonement. As a new feature, I am holding mock trials against the more egregious examples of suspiciously similar excerpts.

Charge: Stealing a passage from a memoir about nursing practices in World War II.

Evidence (from Slate):

Atonement by Ian McEwen	No Time for Romance by Lucilla Andrews
In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise.	Our "nursing" seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains.
…only after the second change of washing water should the freshly soaped back flannel and back towel be passed to the patient so that he could "finish off for himself."	…the freshly soaped "back" flannel and "back" towel were to be handed the patient with the words, "I am sure you would like to finish yourself off now…

The Defense: (Yellojkt Plagiarist Excuse® #3) Ian McEwen in a long article that invokes his dad the military veteran, he concludes with, “For certain long-outdated medical practices, she was my sole source and I have always been grateful to her. I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author's note at the end of Atonement, and ever since on public platforms…”

Closing Arguments: I'm not familar with Atonement, but I have read (well, listened to the unabridged audiobook) of Saturday. The novel Saturday covers one day in the life of a twee British neurosurgeon who gets in a fenderbender and has his life fall apart. If this sounds like a tough premise, you’re right. I found the book absurdly plotted and had a tough time sympathizing with his upper-class twits. Still, the medical scenes were very well researched and clearly beyond the scope of expertise of a novelist.

I expect a writer to have to rely on more knowledgeable sources a little bit because it’s so bad when they get it wrong. I lost all respect for Tom Clancy when MacDill Air Force Base got called Fort MacDill. You have to get the small stuff right. For McEwan to hew very closely to the written account is to avoid risking embarrassment by changing details that either didn’t or couldn’t happen. Also, the burden of proof against fiction writers is much higher than for historians and the like. Nobody wants to see tons of footnotes in a novel.

Verdict: Misdemeanor cribbing. No real plot points or themes were stolen.

Sentence: The official epithet for McEwan shall hereafter be appended to be “Booker Prize winning author and alleged plagiarist” as a cautionary warning against writers wishing to cite him as a precedent.

Next case on the docket: Sorkin vs. Spy

Who Owns My Words?

Who owns the words you put on your blog? The answer may surprise you. In internet parlance, the abbreviation IANAL means “I am not a lawyer” and usually prefaces the phrase “, but…” as the beginning of a pseudo-legal diatribe. Well, I never could grow the dorsal fin, so IANAL, but…

There is a subtle land grab going on in the intellectual property cyberspace wild west. Read over this excerpt from the Myspace Terms of Service:

By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services.

I take this to mean that anything you put on MySpace can be used by them for anything they want for free. The last sentence is about the only protection that keeps News Corp (the owners of MySpace and Fox Television) from putting out a “Best Of” album featuring all those indie-bands that are using the viral social network to bypass that atherosclerotic albatross that commercial radio has become. It also lets you use your own stuff anywhere else because the click-license is non-exclusive.

Compare this to the phrases used by Washingtonpost.com on their blogs:

6. For any content that you post, you hereby grant to washingtonpost.com the royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, exclusive and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content in whole or in part, world-wide and to incorporate it in other works, in any form, media or technology now known or later developed.

I don’t know whether the WaPo lawyers are dumber or smarter than the ones for MySpace but the key difference is that the Post estracts an exclusive license. Once you post a comment on the Achenblog, they own it forever and if you want to produce a book with your collected wit and wisdom, you need to cut in Katherine Graham’s estate or at the very least negotiate a sub-license from Tom Jim Brady or Cifford Sloan.

My Fathers Day post was based on a Boodle comment I made awhile back that I thought would make a nice expanded post of my own. The Post can claim to own my words, but they can’t take my memories away. I defy them to come after me.

Under these poorly written Discussion Guidelines (that have been re-written at least once to correct an obvious contradiction), you cannot “promote commercial entities.” I guess it’s a violation if I say I had a good meal at a particular restaurant or I really liked George Will’s latest Newseek column. Joel Achenbach had better be careful about further plugs for Chateau Nehicola.

Plagiar-Lists

In plagiarism news, Dan Brown seems to have been exonerated in the pretty trivial lawsuit that had been brought against him, once again reinforcing the maxim that stealing from one is plagiarism, but stealing from many is research. The distraction appears to be keeping the reading public from getting their next poorly written thriller full of idiotic conspiracies as fast as the publishing world would hope. But like whacking moles, new accusations of pagiarism are always being unearthed.

A new case that seems more clear cut involves Kaavya Viswanathan, the author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life and a sophomore at Harvard, that has been accused of copying passages from stories by Megan McCafferty. According to a Washington Post article by David A. Fahrenthold, several passages appear to be nearly identical.

Kaavya Viswanathan	Megan McCafferty
Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty.	Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.
Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend.	Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend.

The Harvard Crimson, which broke the story, has plenty of other examples.

Fahrenhold in his lede says:

That long list of excuses authors have given for writing a book that turns out to contain parts of somebody else's book just got a little longer. Add to the "Oh, I thought those were my notes" and the "I was in too much of a hurry," this one: unconscious copying.

I wouldn’t give Viswanathan that much credit. Her defense is really a variation of Rule #7 from Yellojkt's Top Ten Excuses Used by Plagiarists (©2006 by yellojkt) which states:

7. I didn’t copy. I changed a bunch of words.

I think that “unconscious copying” is a pretty fancy way of saying “I changed a BUNCH of words.” Or in her case, at least one a sentence. Unfortunately I am not well enough versed in the coming-of-age sub-genre of Chick-Lit to speak authoritatively on the merits of the broader accusation of suspiciously similar “characters, and plot points" as the WaPo article alleges McCafferty claims.

In fiction, the standards for plagiarism have to just a little bit different. If I am writing a book about an obsessive quest for a white whale, it could be interpreted as a re-imagining, or in the case of The Wind Done Gone, a parody (that being the most defensible way of using obviously similar characters and events). Directly lifting, or “unconscious copying" text is pretty damning evidence.

I do like it that Fahrenthold referred to a hypothetical canonical list of excuses that plagiarists use, particularly since I have already prepared such a list. I would love to see the other items on his list because I am sure we can fold them into one or more of my established categories. After all, I am not the only person to have come up with a list of plagiarist’s excuses. A quick due diligence Google® search into the prior art produces this list and this list.

Creating a numbered list is not even a particularly original idea. David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists are probably the most famous. When David moved from NBC to CBS, CBS insisted on keeping the rights to many of the “bits” (a specific sub-category of “intellectual property”) like Stupid Pet Tricks, the Top Ten List went with him. He was either able to make the argument that the lists predate his work with CBS or that the concept is too generic to own. Letterman's distinguishing characteristic is that his lists countdown rocket launch style.

I first fell in love with lists from the astoundingly appropriately named Book of Lists by Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace. While I can no longer remember many of the individual lists, the impression on me was tremendous. Not to mention that many of them were very risque that meant that as a thirteen year-old, I could read some pretty smutty stuff in broad daylight since the book looked so informative.

I am often tempted to do as a blog post music related lists like Cars Mentioned By Bruce Springsteen or Musical Tributes To Onanism, only to find they’ve been done earlier and better in my The New Book of Rock Lists by David Marsh. And once I’ve seen his list, my mind is tainted, so I abandon the idea.

I love lists and I hate plagiarists. There are even some pretty funny lists about plagiarism.

A Plague of Plagiarists

The big kerfuffle in the blogosphere this week was the debacle at WashingtonPost.com and their rather short-lived conservative Republican blogger. RedAmerica, as they named the blog (after rejecting RedDawn as being too obviously pro-gun), was written by a young well-connected blogger named Ben Domenech. I really don’t follow political blogs very much because the signal-to-noise ratio is just horrendous, so I was unfamiliar with RedState, where Domenech, who seems to like the color red, wrote under the pseudonym Augustine (a gimmick he probably lifted from Enders Game).

Well young Ben came out guns ablazing. In his first post he tiraded against the “shrieking denizens” of the left, who immediately took umbrage and started turning over rocks looking for something to throw at him. Ben immediately apologized for calling Coretta Scott King a “communist” while the rest of the country including our president was eulogizing her.

Then the charges of plagiarism came out. And they stuck. Liberal sites like DailyKos and Atrios began cataloging suspiciously similar phrases, paragraphs and even entire articles as fast as searches could reveal them. WaPo.com announced an investigation and Domenech resigned. His entire blog lasted less than 100 hours. Joel Achenbach, a real journalist and the WaPo's top blogger basically says good riddance.

I really don’t care about Ben’s politics or the extremely poor judgment on a lot of levels that the Post showed in hiring him. I‘m more interested in the plagiarism aspect which is extremely perplexing. I disagree that plagiarism is the worst offense a journalist can make. Blatant libelous character assassination is the most criminally actionable, but since the burden of proof is so high in the US, Tom Cruise and Roman Polanski and others with a beef with the press run to the more sympathetic British courts. I would even call outright fabrication even worse than plagiarism. As Janet Cook, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair have shown, the actions of one person can severely tarnish the reputation of a whole organization and reinforce suspicions about the entire journalism industry.

Plagiarism in the internet age is paradoxical because it is so easy to do yet so easy to detect. My wife found the winning poem in a contest at her school a little better than the student’s previous work would suggest she was capable of. A trial membership at an anti-plagiarism website immediately revealed the poem as copyrighted material. Definitely easier to detect than it was in John Kelly’s day.

Domenech’s “borrowing” was so irrefutable that his ostensible right-wing friends like Michelle Malkin, who he had worked with, had to back away. Rather than ‘fessing up immediately, Ben went to the plagiarist’s stock list of excuses. They include in decreasing plausibility:

Yellojkt's Top Ten Excuses Used by Plagiarists

1. My notes were poor and I didn’t realize it was a quote and not my own thought.
2. It was an editing error. The attribution got lost in revision.
3. I referenced the source once and that should be enough.
4. That idea is in the public domain and I didn’t get it from the person accusing me.
5. It was a youthful indiscretion.
6. I was just using the press release, that’s what it’s there for. (Corollary: I didn’t steal from him, we both stole from that guy.)
7. I didn’t copy. I changed a bunch of words.
8. People do it to me, so what’s the big deal?
9. The source said I could use it and just doesn’t remember now.
10. Someone else did it and signed my name to it.

© 2006 by yellojkt. All attributions or re-use must include a link to this post. Don't lie, cheat or steal.


Sometimes the reasons make sense. Dan Brown is defending himself for his ideas in The DaVinci Code using a combination of excuses 3 and 4. And I think that line of thought has some validity. Plenty of authors have written about Jesus and Mary Magdalene hooking up. Memory and Google fail me, but I’m pretty sure one of the Dangerous Visions collections from the 60s had just such a story.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has emerged only slightly battered using reason 1 and 2. A slew of pro-Walmart apologists are hiding behind the cover of 6. While Ben didn’t use the whole list, I think he invented items 9 and 10, perhaps the only original thoughts he has ever had. He finally took full blame in a rather defensive non-specific way and is now on his way to being a cause celebre and a martyr.

Accusations of plagiarism can be a career-ending death-blow. Newspaper columnists seem particularly susceptible as high profile cases like Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe have shown. Something about the high volume of deadline writing and the tendancy to annoy people that may want to get back at you makes for a dangerous combination.

Here in Baltimore, highly respected columnist Michael Olesker resigned from the Baltimore Sun after reports from the local weekly alternative City Paper raised some questions. As David Simon explains, columnists have a tough time because they often have to summarize an issue in the news before opining on it. In Oleskar’s case, his little summaries were too often too similar to previously printed descriptions. The Sun never quite used the “P”-word, but they did say his stuff did not meet their standards for attribution. I think the cases they dug up are pretty slim, but based on the shabby treatment the Sunpapers has given their columnists in the past (see my mourning of Jules Witcover), I think the powers that be decided to err on the side of lower overhead.

In college, I was accused of plagiarism by a professor because she did not think the word “hegemonistic” was within the vocabulary of an engineering student. The word did not appear anywhere in the source and was my own interpretation. I had to meet with her and trot out my Model United Nations geek bona fides to convince her. She gave me and A on the paper, but I still got a B for the course.

What is the take-away lesson for bloggers? Cite and source. A whole page of hot links can look a little Christmas tree like, but it shows you know what you are doing and that you give credit where credit is due. I don’t know where I heard that first, but it seems like good advice.