Can You Plagiarize An Idea?

from the words,-words,-words dept

Time and time again, we've heard about people claiming "plagiarism" when the truth is that it's just someone else who happened to have the same, or a similar, idea. It often happens with books and movies. For example, multiple people are suing over the claim that only they could have come up with the idea of a child who has a secret life as a rockstar, and Hannah Montana stole their idea. But actual copyright infringement or plagiarism (two different things) require some actual copying -- not just people having the same idea. Given that, it's not entirely clear what's going on with the claim (found via Michael Scott) that the ex-wife of the singer Usher, Tamika Foster, may have "plagiarized" a self-published author when she wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post called "She's Pretty for a Dark-Skinned Girl..." The author claiming plagiarism had written a book, similarly titled "Pretty for a Black Girl."

But is it plagiarism, or just two people coming up with the same idea? Unfortunately, the report at the link above never bothers to tell us! It simply repeats the claim from the woman that it's plagiarism, but her quotes suggest that it's not:

"My heart sank into my stomach. All the hard work, all the sleepless nights I had endured was playing back in my head as I read this article written by a woman I didn't even know," [Aisha] Curry told BV Buzz. "Why did I feel so connected to this article? Suddenly, it came to me. It was my work! It was my work, my voice, but in her words."

Well, there's a problem there. If it's her words then it's not plagiarism. Also, Curry seems to undermine her own argument in explaining how she came up with the idea for the book:

"One day about five years ago, I was absolutely tired of being told that I was pretty for a black girl," she explained. "I started asking my friends if they had heard this statement before, and as time went on, I realized how prevalent the issue was."

Right. The comment is apparently prevalent, meaning that Tameka Foster certainly could have heard the same thing on her own, and could have decided to write her own essay about it. That's not plagiarism. That's multiple people recognizing something that's prevalent and deciding to write about it. Foster's representatives claim they've never heard of the book. But the real question is whether or not it's actually plagiarism, and that could have been determined by finding out if there were any passages actually pulled from the book. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anyone actually decided to do that. However, as you read Foster's article, much of it seems to be about her own personal experiences, not Curry's, which again suggests this isn't plagiarism at all, but two people writing about a similar concept that is (as admitted by Curry) already "prevalent."

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Which Is More Important? Ownership Of Ideas... Or Community, Knowledge & Learning?

from the some-questions dept

My wonderful sister sent over the following quote on plagiarism vs. a community of knowledge and scholarship by famed literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, from his classic book, American Renaissance:

"During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources--to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare's age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share."
-F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance 1941

Good stuff. Too bad so few still seem to feel the same way.

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Misplaced Blame In Copyright Infringement Claim Over Plagiarized Website

from the why-not-blame-the-actual-party? dept

Rose M. Welch alerts us to a court case where two law firms are fighting over a copied web page. There seems to be no question at all that the website of one law firm used almost an exact copy of some text from another law firm's website. So that would make it a pretty clear cut case. But... there's a bit of a complication. The law firm who used the copied content didn't realize the content was copied. It had hired an outside firm to build the website, and someone at that firm copied the content in creating the website. An arbiter ruled that the development firm was 2/3 responsible, but that the law firm was still 1/3 responsible, and the case has now shifted from arbitration to court. The problem is that it still seems difficult to see why the law firm should be liable at all. The folks they hired to create the website did the actual copying, and the law firm had no idea. So why should they take the blame?

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Yusuf Islam Forgives Coldplay For Copying His Song, Even Though They Probably Didn't

from the ockham's-razor-much? dept

When Joe Satriani sued Coldplay for copyright infringment last December, lots of people were quick to notice that a bunch of other songs shared the same melody, including some predating Satriani's tune. Last month, Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) made headlines claiming that Coldplay had "stolen" the melody from him, not Satriani. Islam's 1973 song was one of many that people had noticed which sounded similar, but Islam was sure Coldplay got the melody from him ("if you listen to it, it's mine!") and said he'd decide whether or not to take legal action "depending on how well Satriani does." Now, Islam is talking about it again, this time saying he's not angry with Coldplay:

I stand by what I said. They did copy my song but I don't think they did it on purpose. I can understand why they got so upset because they probably don't even realise they have done it. It happens all the time. I have even copied myself without knowing I have done it. I'll write down what I think is a new melody and then listen back to it and realise it's the same as something I have already done. It's just one of those things and I don't want them to think I'm angry with them. I'd love to sit down and have a cup of tea with them and let them know it's ok.

That's a step up from Satriani's "dagger through my heart" response, especially if he's suggesting the cup of tea instead of a lawsuit (though, TwentyFourBit notes that the Flaming Lips would be annoyed if Coldplay gets a tea settlement while they got a royalty split). But it's still odd that Islam is so convinced that the melody is his. What about all the other songs with the same melody? Islam doesn't even entertain the possibility that no copying took place, that it's just a natural melody to sing over those chords. He's forgiving them for something they deny having done, and, although upset initially, Chris Martin actually said the claims are inspiration to write better songs. It's nice to see Islam recognize that this sort of thing "happens all the time" and that "it's ok" -- and hopefully that means he's given up on a lawsuit -- but he fails to admit even the possibility that Coldplay came up with the melody on their own. Regardless, this can't be helping Satriani's case.

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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JK Rowling Accused Of Plagiarizing Harry Potter... Yet Again

from the not-again? dept

For years, there have been various accusations that JK Rowling "stole" the characters or ideas for her series of Harry Potter books. The claim that got the most attention was Nancy Stouffer's book "The Legend Of RAH And The Muggles" which not only uses the word "muggles" (used in Rowling's work as well) but also has a character named Larry Potter (who has some resemblance to Harry's character). But, of course, that wasn't all. Last year, we wrote about a 1986 movie called Troll that also had a character named "Harry Potter." But apparently, that's not enough. The latest is that Rowling's publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, has been sued again for plagiarism over the Potter books, this time by the estate of Adrian Jacobs. It seems that Jacobs once wrote a book about a boy wizard called Willy The Wizard that has some distant similarities to some stuff that happens in the Potter books.

The whole thing is pretty silly, of course. The publisher is vehemently denying any copying, and it seems unlikely that any copying did actually happen. However even if you did grant the premise and say that Rowling was "inspired" by some other book, so what? Did it really change the economics of the original book? If anything, this latest claim is just a clear money grab, designed to give new attention to a long-ignored book. No one could claim with a straight face that Rowling's work took away any value from the other book.

Of course, the side note to all of this is how aggressive Rowling has been about trying to "protect" her own copyright on the Potter books. Last year, author Orson Scott Card tore apart Rowling for her aggressive enforcement of copyright, while noting some amusing "similarities" between his own classic, Ender's Game, and the Harry Potter series -- pointing out that lots of people have similar ideas or are inspired by others -- and trying to shut them down is a mistake.

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Former Conference Board Author Explains How Lobbyists Influenced Plagiarized Reports

from the well,-there's-that... dept

Wow. If you thought that the whole saga with the deceptive and plagiarized reports about intellectual property in Canada was over, when The Conference Board of Canada recalled the reports and admitted that they were both plagiarized and not up to research standards, think again. One of the named authors of the report is now speaking out to reveal some of the behind the scenes details. Now, he's only giving one side, but if his version of the events is true, it's incredibly damning of the Conference Board. Basically, he says that he wrote a very, very different research report last year, and handed it over in late August. He had already quit to take another job, but had finished up his research. However, months later, he received phone calls from both The Conference Board and some of the IP lobbyists who funded the research to complain about what the research said (impartial? non-biased?). Since he was no longer employed, he figured it was none of his business, but he implies that in response to these calls, the Conference Board appears to have replaced much of what he wrote with the plagiarized snippets from the lobbyist's own reports... but left his name on the report as an author. He's not happy:

• I was a full-time employee with the Conference Board between September 2007 and July 2008. I resigned almost a year ago to take a fulfilling job with a non-profit in British Columbia.
• I submitted draft research to my former supervisor for the IP reports in mid-August 2008. I finished the research after I moved even though I was neither on salary nor on contract with the Board.
• The research I submitted did NOT include the controversial passages or plagiarized content.
• I worked with three contract researchers on this project between April 2008 and June 2008, including Jeremy deBeer, whose work I integrated into the draft. These researchers did not submit research that included the controversial/plagiarized content.
• I had no involvement in any content changes and did not see these papers after I submitted them in August.
• My new work was interrupted in mid-September by my former supervisor at the Conference Board to tell me there had been “push back” from one of the funding clients about the research and inclusion of Mr. deBeer’s contribution. I had quit almost two months earlier so this was of no concern to me.
• Around the same time, my new work was also interrupted by a call from one of the funding clients who expressed similar concerns. Again, I informed him that I no longer had anything to do with these reports.
• I received news of its publication on May 26, 2009, ten months after my resignation. I downloaded and read the research after I was informed of the controversy and was alarmed to see the direction it had taken.
• I sent my letter to Anne Golden the following day.
• The VP of Public Policy e-mailed me on May 29th to ask for my assistance in finding both researchers who could "fix" the reports, as well as external reviewers who would be impartial in reviewing the new work. His message stated that “I trust your judgment, experience and knowledge and would value your help.”

The Conference Board wants my help to fix reports that were published 10 months after my departure. It wants me to help fix publications that were re-written (and plagiarized) months after my departure and after they discarded the research I compiled and submitted. The Conference Board asks for my help but won't acknowledge that it was wrong to put my name on reports that bear little resemblance to the original research I submitted, were substantially reworked, and were published ten months after I resigned. After Anne Golden laid blame on contract researchers and supervisors late last week, I noticed two of the authors who still were listed on the organization's web site were no longer on the staff list.

If true, this is all pretty damning, and raises serious questions about how The Conference Board of Canada created this report, as well as its impartial nature as a research institute. It's no secret that many research firms are accused of producing reports that favor the funders of those reports -- but to specifically toss out contrary results and replace them with the funders' own text goes beyond even what many "pay for the research results you want" type firms normally do.

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Once Again, 'Defenders Of Copyright' Found To Have No Problem Copying Others

from the funny-stuff dept

We recently discussed UK law firm, Davenport Lyons, which had been criticized widely for running a controversial campaign supposedly to stamp out copyright infringement, but seemed a lot more like extortion to many. Basically it would contract with software companies to enforce their copyright... and would then send out a ton of demand letters (based on questionable evidence) requiring cash payments to avoid being sued. Not surprisingly, many people just paid up rather than risk getting sued -- even if they were innocent. Of course, all the controversy and negative publicity seemed to get back to the company. High profile clients like Atari dropped them. Last month, some noticed a nearly identical campaign, but this time coming from a different company called ACS Law. The only problem? A little investigating suggested that the two firms were clearly related -- with ACS using documents created by Davenport Lyons.

Things continue to get more ridiculous, as TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said.

It really is quite amusing how often those who insist they're big supporters of intellectual property and not "stealing" the works of others always seem to get caught red-handed in plagiarism and copying others' work. In the meantime, how often do we see supporters of more reasonable copyright (or no copyright) get caught doing this? Hmm?

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Newspaper Journalists Claiming TV Reporters Are 'Plagiarizing' The News

from the sense-of-entitlement dept

Ima Fish writes " Seattlepi.com has a posting on its blog section from "the News Chick" about how broadcast news "plagiarizes" print news. Here's the gist of the complaint:

"Print journalists consider it plagiarism. Broadcasters call it a "rewrite."

Here's how it works in nearly every news market in the country. Print reporters do research and interviews for a story that ends up being about 800 words or so. Broadcasters rewrite and condense the paper's story to around 50 words - sometimes adding their own audio or video - then present it as their own."

Condensing 800 words down to 50 words is not plagiarism, if the word "plagiarism" is to have any real meaning, of course.

The person complaining the most is Seattle's Tri-City Herald editor Ken Robertson. He's careful not to use words such as "stolen" and only goes as far as to say his stories were "lifted." Which makes sense because even he knows he has absolutely no copyright claim on the news itself. But if he knows that, exactly what is he complaining about? That he didn't get his pat on the back when an important news story got wider coverage?!

And I'm reminded of the recent postings involving Aretha Franklin and the producers of Britain's Got Talent. Franklin, the producers, and any newspaper writer got exactly what she or he bargained for. Franklin looked fashionable. The producers got paid for producing their show. And a newspaper writer got paid for writing stories. Why should they be given any credit beyond that? Franklin didn't make the hat fashionable. The producers did not make Boyle an incredible singer. And newspaper writers do not create news, they report on news. The sense of entitlement on such issues is quite bizarre."

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The Conference Board Of Canada Recalls Three IP Reports; Admits Plagiarism

from the wow dept

Earlier this week, we noted the massive problems with a recent set of reports put out by The Conference Board of Canada about intellectual property in Canada. Based on highly questionable research with parts of it apparently copy/pasted from lobbyist reports, the whole thing was a mess, and a significant drain on The Conference Board of Canada's credibility as an impartial analyst on these sorts of issues. Michael Geist has been leading the charge in exposing these reports for what they are, and I recently agreed to team up with Geist (really: back him up by saying "yeah, what he said!" over and over again) in a debate with the Conference Board organized by the Mesh guys. Except... while waiting for The Conference Board to respond to the offer to debate, something quite surprising happened: the Conference Board of Canada has recalled all three IP reports and put out a statement reading:

The Conference Board of Canada has recalled three reports: Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy; National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative Analysis; and Intellectual Property Rights--Creating Value and Stimulating Investment. An internal review has determined that these reports did not follow the high quality research standards of The Conference Board of Canada.

Separately, the CEO of The Conference Board of Canada has supposedly admitted the report was plagiarized. Kudos to Michael Geist for his relentless following of this story, and making sure it got the attention it deserved... and kudos to The Conference Board of Canada for actually backing down (despite first defending the credibility of the report) once it realized how problematic it was. However, it is disappointing that it took massive publicity to get the company to recognize and admit the mistake. It's troubling that it would have put out lobbyist talking points in cut-and-paste fashion in the first place... and it makes you wonder if it's happened with other reports from The Conference Board of Canada. In the meantime, I guess this means I'm not flying to Toronto any time soon...

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BSA's Canadian Piracy Numbers Based On Hunches, Not Actual Surveys

from the bogus-stats-as-always dept

For years, we've been raising questions about the incredibly bogus stats the BSA puts out every year. There are so many problems with them it's incredible that the group continues to release them each year... and much worse that the press and politicians quote them as if they're factual. However, Michael Geist has discovered that they're even worse than originally thought. In digging deeper into the questionable claims of the report by The Conference Board of Canada that was basically a cut and paste from various industry groups, Geist noticed that the report relied on some BSA data. So he asked for more info on how the BSA determined the "piracy" rate of software in Canada. How many people were surveyed? What was the methodology?

In response, Geist found out that no one in Canada was surveyed, and BSA (and IDC who created the report) simply made an educated guess, assuming the piracy rates weren't all that different than they were in past years. Yet this hunch, based on no actual data, is being used as a definitive source of piracy numbers in Canada? Even more noteworthy, both the BSA and The Conference Board report use these numbers to support the silly claim that Canada is somehow one of the worst offenders when it comes to supporting "piracy." But what was the reason for not surveying companies in Canada?

"Countries that are included in the survey portion are chosen to represent the more volatile economies. IDC has found from past research that low piracy countries, generally mature markets, have stable software loads by segment, with yearly variations driven more by segment dynamics (e.g. consumer shipment versus business shipments of PCs) than by load-by-load segment."

So... just to get this straight. IDC doesn't bother to survey Canadians about software piracy, because it considers Canada to be a "low piracy" country. So it just makes up the number... and then the BSA, other lobbyists, research groups, the press and politicians (including the US Trade Representative) use these made up numbers to support the claims that Canada is a high piracy country. Doesn't that seem like fraud?

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Canadian Report On IP Not Just Deceptive... But Plagiarized

from the oops dept

Once again, we're seeing a report or person pushing for stronger IP laws that seems to feel that it's fine if they cut some corners. Michael Geist has the story of a report from The Conference Board of Canada, which describes itself as "the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests." Except... when the money's good. It's latest report, backed by a bunch of copyright lobbyists and the gov't of Ontatio (taxpayer money!) isn't just deceptive but appears to plagiarize widely from other already debunked reports, without a hint of skepticism or independent thought. Instead, it appears to have simply cut & pasted certain sections. While plagiarism and copyright are two separate issues, they are related in some ways -- and it's rather stunning that a report complaining about mass piracy in Canada would plagiarize large sections. But, even worse, of course, is the claim that this is from an independent group with no lobbying interests, when the plagiarized sections were written by lobbyists. Whatever credibility The Conference Board of Canada had (and apparently it's a well-respected organization), it just lost a bunch of it. Meanwhile, The Conference Board insists that it's standing by the report and only made a minor mistake in how it cited the info used in its report. Of course, that's not quite true. It didn't clearly quote the sections it copied, nor did it do any work to confirm whether that information was correct or simply repeated what the lobbyists who hired the company had already written elsewhere.

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Cat Stevens Claims Coldplay's 'Viva La Vida' Was Copied From His Song, Not Satriani's

from the hey,-the-lineup's-over-there dept

When guitarist Joe Satriani sued Coldplay for copyright infringement last December, Techdirt readers were quick to point out lots of other songs that sound similar (a great example of the importance of the conversation). Keyz noted that both songs sound a lot like a 1973 Cat Stevens tune.

Guess who else noticed?

Cat Stevens (whose name is now Yusuf Islam) has accused Coldplay of copying his melody from the "Foreigner Suite" (feel free to compare). He told the U. K. Sun, "there's been this argument about Coldplay stealing this melody from Joe Satriani, but, if you listen to it, it's mine! It's the Foreigner Suite, it is!" He claimed that his decision whether or not to pursue this legally will "depend on how well Satriani does" (this wouldn't be the first such lawsuit from Islam).

The problem is, once you think about this for 6-8 seconds (the length of the melody in question)... it's just insane. Is Islam threatening Satriani too? If Coldplay used his melody, isn't Satriani also guilty? Does Satriani still feel that dagger through his heart if the melody wasn't even "his" to begin with? What about the Creaky Boards, who also claimed the song as theirs a year ago? What about all the other songs that sound similar -- Pounding (Doves), J'en Ai Marre (Alizee), Honesty (Billy Joel), Frances Limon (Enanitos Verdes), Hearts (Marty Balin)? At what point does it become obvious that it's more likely that no copying took place than that everyone is guilty of plagiarism? If anything, this accusation strengthens Coldplay's claim that this was just a coincidence.

A cynic might assume these are just blatant money grabs or publicity stunts; Satriani is demanding "any and all profits," Islam is waiting to see how well Satriani does and the accusation comes the day before his latest album release. Also, a cynical approach would explain why Islam seems to be threatening Coldplay instead of Satriani (hint: which song has made more money?), unless Islam's just letting Satriani do all the work and planning to lay claim on whatever he captures. Unfortunately, I think there may be a little honesty (no, not the Billy Joel song...) to Satriani's "dagger to the heart" comment and Islam's exclamation of "it's mine!" (my precious...). The success of "Viva La Vida" has provided the incentive to actually make these accusations real, but they do seem to be rooted in some sense of actually feeling wronged; these artists really seem to believe some sort of injustice has occurred, that no one else would have come up with the same few notes over the same few chords except by "stealing" from them. Of all people, musicians ought to know there are only so many ways to combine chords. Worrying about who came up with the idea "first" is yet another case of favoring invention over innovation, of giving a rather meaningless importance to chronology when it's really the way in which people connect with the art that's most important.

There have been successful copyright infringement lawsuits over melodies in the past, but I'm not sure that there has been such a high profile case like this with multiple people claiming infringement. Hopefully, the overlapping accusations of plagiarism backfire and actually suggest there was no wrongdoing so that a silly and complex web-of-royalties scenario is avoided for what was most likely independent creation. Here's to hoping that another two or three artists add to the chorus of accusations, further demonstrating how ridiculous this all is!

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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New Consortium Says If Others Can Monetize Better Than We Can... We Deserve Their Money?

from the please-explain dept

We've pointed out in the past how silly it is to be worried about various spam/scraper sites that take content from sites (including ours) and repost it on their own. Those sites never add any real value, but just repost the content. They get no significant traffic and retain no real audience. They tend to come and go pretty quickly. Worrying about them is a total waste of time (time that can be used making sure your own site is more valuable). Yet, apparently a group of publishers has put together a "Fair Syndication Consortium" that has decided that rather than go after these sites directly, it will simply try to get the ad networks that serve ads on such sites to hand over some money to the original content creators. As far as I can tell, that's basically the content creators saying "well, if others can monetize our content better than we can, we deserve some of that cash."

That makes no sense to me. If you can't monetize your own content better than other sites, you don't deserve to be in business. If other sites are actually getting traffic and ad revenue that you think you deserve, it means you're doing a bad job giving people a real reason to visit your site and to interact with your community. Simply demanding money from the sites that have done things better makes no sense. Of course, the reality is that most of these sites haven't done things better, and don't make any money. So the whole grandstanding seems rather wasted effort.

Focus on making your own site worth visiting. Stop worrying what others are doing with your content.

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Can Plagiarism Add Value?

from the perhaps-not... dept

A bunch of folks have sent in the story in Cracked, entitled 5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism, showing how Stephen Ambrose, T.S. Eliot, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Owen and H.G. Wells all appear to have plagiarized certain major works. As we've discussed in the past, while straight-up plagiarism can hurt someone's reputation in pretty serious ways, we have a bit more trouble condemning "plagiarism" where someone took something and turned it into something different. Jonathan Bailey, a staunch fighter against any type of plagiarism and copyright infringement, has written about the Cracked article, where he notes that the five men listed in the article would have a lot more trouble getting away with the same sort of plagiarism today, suggesting that's a good thing. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. In at least some of the cases of plagiarism listed in the original article, these guys took something someone else had done, but made it more impressive and did a better job getting the world to experience something wonderful. Would the world be better off without some of the works by these five men, even if they didn't necessarily originate from them? I'm not so sure... That's not to say that appropriating the works of others and pretending it's your own is okay. The reputation hit you're likely to take for doing that is pretty severe and not worth it. But I have a hard time believing that the actual final effect on the rest of the world is that bad.

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Why Is 'Self-Plagiarism' Even An Issue?

from the it's-called-reinforcement? dept

A recent report looked at how scientists respond when caught plagiarizing a research paper. The article and the responses are a bit amusing -- but what struck me was the claim that the vast majority of "plagiarism" was actually "self-plagiarism." In other words, the researcher was effectively reusing some bit of material he or she had published for something else. I'm sure some academics will be quick to explain why this is a horrible breach of academic protocol, but I'm having a very difficult time understanding how this makes any sense, whatsoever. Reusing concepts, ideas, data or anything else would seem to be an incredibly useful tool for the purposes of reinforcement, or even to build on those earlier works. Limiting that for some artificial standard just doesn't seem to make much sense. There obviously may be cases where the first research journal to publish something gets the copyright on the content (an all-too-frequent occurrence, especially for publicly-funded research), but even then it's not "plagiarism" so much as copyright infringement, potentially -- and it seems ridiculous to not allow such reuse to go forward.

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University Report On Dealing With Plagiarism... Plagiarized!

from the how-about-that... dept

Been meaning to write this one up for a bit, and finally got to it. Michael Scott points us to an amusing story about how Southern Illinois University was dealing with some plagiarism problems and decided to put out a report on how to deal with plagiarism. That report included a nice description of plagiarism that turned out to be (you guessed it) plagiarized. Hopefully that makes Southern Illinois University rethink its position on plagiarism... but that seems unlikely.

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The Worst Response To A Reasonable Response To A DMCA Takedown I've Seen

from the forgive-the-hyperbole dept

Forgive the hyperbole in the headline. It's mostly a reaction to the headline of this post, sent in by JJ, from the site "Plagiarism Today" declaring: The Worst DMCA Response I've Seen. There, Plagiarism Today's Jonathan Bailey absolutely trashes the webhost Joyent for daring to defend one of its customers after Bailey sent Joyent a DMCA takedown. As we were recently reminded by an entertainment industry lawyer, just because you receive a DMCA takedown, you don't actually have to take down the content, if you believe the DMCA notice is wrong. It's rare to not do the takedown, because ignoring the takedown can potentially add significant liability, because you're rejecting the automatic safe harbors in the DMCA -- but if you believe it's wrong, you can keep the content up. That's what Joyent did. Joyent actually defended its customer and didn't immediately take down the content. That's hardly "the worst response." In fact, that makes me feel even more inclined to trust Joyent as a host that doesn't rush to pull content down.

Still, it's worth exploring in a bit greater detail what upset Bailey so much. Now, to be clear, I tend to think that plagiarism isn't nearly as evil as some make it out to be. I believe that those who do "plagiarize" without adding any value put their own reputations at great risk -- but it's hardly "stealing" or damaging in most cases. Mostly, it's just dumb. In other cases, it can be the root of collaboration and inspiration. On top of that, when it comes to blogs and blog plagiarism, I take an even dimmer view of complaints. People repost our content all the time, and that's great. But it gets even more ridiculous when people whine about their RSS feed being reposted. That's the entire point of an RSS feed -- for it to get posted elsewhere.

And that's exactly what happened to Bailey. He was complaining about an RSS aggregation site that was doing exactly what the RSS feed is designed to do: aggregating content. It redisplayed exactly what Bailey put in his feed -- and even linked right back to Bailey's original. The site appeared to be helping to promote Bailey's feed and using the very tool Bailey provided to do so. In fact, if you look around the web, you'll find plenty of other, well known and popular sites doing the same thing. For example, here's the aggregator Bloglines redisplaying Bailey's feed. Is that a DMCA violation? It seems to be the same thing that this (unnamed) site was doing. Bailey claims that even if this other site was an aggregator site, it doesn't count because somehow he didn't think the site added enough value. Isn't that for the users to decide? If that site really isn't adding much value, then what is he worrying about? No one will bother reading his content on that site because there's no additional value in doing so.

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Plagiarizing Speechwriter Pushed For Stronger Copyright Laws

from the funny-how-that-works dept

Why is it so often that we find those who strongly push for certain types of draconian laws are later found to be guilty of violating those laws? The latest is a mini-scandal in Canada, involving a plagiarized speech. Now, I've pointed out before that I'm actually all for plagiarizing politicians. However, as Rob Hyndman points out, it turns out that the guy who copied the speech, one Owen Lippert, wrote a book on intellectual property, where he pushed for much stronger intellectual property rules to be included in trade agreements. Of course, it's worth pointing out that plagiarism and copyright are related, but not the same -- but you would think that someone who believes so strongly in more stringent intellectual property laws would be a lot more careful about potentially doing anything that shows a disregard for intellectual property.

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Self Plagiarism And The Creative Process

from the but-is-it-infringement? dept

Last year, we had a post looking at the question of joke "stealing" and if it should be seen as infringement. Basically, there are tons of comics who are known for "stealing" the jokes of other comics, and there's even been some questions about trying to copyright jokes. The whole thing seems ridiculous, frankly. The power of a joke is rarely in the joke itself, but the delivery -- and you can't copyright that. Plus, there seem to be social measures in place to deal with "joke theft." Comics who are regularly caught doing it may have their reputations damaged, as was the case with Carlos Mencia last year.

But there's even more to it than that. In an interesting post on his blog, Scott Adams writes about how he (not for the first time) was caught drawing a nearly identical Dilbert comic strip to one he had done in the past. He delves a bit into his creative process to explain how it works, noting that there are a ton of ideas flowing through his head at once and he just has to reach out and grab from that mass of ideas:

For me, ideas stream through my head at a frantic pace. I feel like a bear trying to grab a salmon. If my paw misses its target, that salmon is gone for good. I don't dwell on it. I just lunge for the next salmon. I think people who have fewer thoughts per hour have time to let them settle in and form memories. It's just a theory.

That's likely true for many creative folks, including stand-up comics. As such, the ideas that you have in your head, and the ones that you hear and see from others end up getting mixed up in that mass of "idea salmon." As such, it shouldn't be surprising or scandalous or bad when someone ends up coming up with a similar (or even almost identical) joke or idea to someone else. It's just part of the creative process at work. It's not "stealing" and it's not "infringement." It's just a recognition of the creative process that involves a large number of ideas flowing around that a content creator tries to bring together in some sort of useful or interesting manner.

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In An Age Of Abundance, Attribution Is More Important Than Copying

from the now-we'll-find-out-who-actually-let-the-dogs-out dept

It's no secret that copyright law has fit, at best, awkwardly into the digital age. Originally designed to make creators more profitable, as the cost of creation has fallen, the government granted monopoly seems more and more outdated. When ideas are abundant, limiting them seems silly. Now, the EFF's Danny O'Brien points out that what might actually matter most to content creators is not limiting copies, but attaining proper attribution -- even though that was not the intended purpose of copyright law.

Because copying used to be expensive, it was reasonable to assume that someone making a copy was going to sell it. Copyright law was aimed at that action to funnel money back to the original creators. It had the side effect of limiting plagiarism by making it more costly, but it was never copyright's goal to mandate proper attribution. Now, however, copying isn't anything extraordinary; in fact, it is the very nature of digital technologies. With the decrease in the price of copies, the cost associated with plagiarism has plummeted, too. O'Brien tells the story of a DJ friend who is more than happy to have her works widely distributed through copies online, but when she learned that another DJ was passing her creation off as his own, she became upset. Shirking copyright law for publicity's sake was fine, but when the historical side-effect of proper attribution also disappeared, she was more worried. Although plagiarism isn't always as troublesome as many assume, as attribution becomes untangled from copyright, the two ideas will be increasingly approached differently by creators.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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