Workflow:Writing Snagging Writer Blogs Without Permission [UPDATE]

There's a site called Workflow:Writing that has a list of blogs about writing. Although I can't speak to all in that long list, I heard from one, on a writers' board, who had until recently been on the list. No one had asked her permission. This site took her RSS feed and posted it, along with all the other sites, and had advertising displayed against it. Click on one of the article links, and you get the original page, only in a frame with a top section that shows a banner ad and the Workflow:Writing logo. Maybe this one woman's blog was the only one stolen - because that's what you call it when you appropriate someone else's property for your own gain. But I have a funny feeling that if I checked with the other bloggers, I'd be hard-pressed to find one that had given explicit permission. If you blog about words, check the link and see if its own had co-opted you. And if you don't, consider stopping by there and expressing your dismay over people who want to cash in on the hard work of others. This site is worse than a writers' mill. At least those offer some token payment. One ironic point: one site with at least one article posted is PlagiarismToday.

UPDATE: Make that two writers whose work has appeared and who said that they hadn't given permission. Any guesses on how many did give permission? Do I hear ... none?

"Free" Author Using Wikipedia Without Attribution [UPDATE]

In a story that restores your post Postmodernist faith in irony, Wired editor Chris Anderson, one of the supporters of giving away chunks of content free and then making money selling a small group of people something else, extensively used Wikimedia as a source in his book "Free" without attribution.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Anyway, what's the big deal? After all, information wants to be free, right? Oh, and you can buy Anderson's book in many places. The list price is $26.99. Can we get a discount for the stuff he, uh, appropriated?

[UPDATE: Ah, but wait, there's more. Much more. Plus a side case of someone accusing The View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck of plagiarizing.]

Testing a Free Web Plagiarism Finder

I'm guessing that the combination of "plagiarism finder" and "free" will light up the eyes of many who read this blog. I just learned of a new service called Plagium. Using Yahoo search, it can take a string of text longer than will work in usual search engine front ends and look to see where on the web it might appear. I tested it with one paragraph from an article I had written for a magazine. Plagium turned up copies not only at the company's web site, but at Entrepreneur.com and Allbusiness.com. (Apparently the magazine sold the piece to Gale Group - yes, folks, the problem with magazines selling without permission to the database companies has not gone away, even if that long-standing class action effectively appears to have. Make sure you're registering your copyrights.)

I ran part of the paragraph through Google, which found only the Entrepreneur.com appearnance, and not the one at Allbusiness.com, so even in that one short experiement, Plagium appears to be the better choice.

At first I didn't enter the entire article, but just the one paragraph, thinking that looking for too great a section might identify potential copyright theft more easily than a long block of material, as someone might not have used the entire piece. But then, what if someone dropped the one graph I searched for? So I had Plagium search on all the text, which turned up the same instances.

So I tried something a bit trickier. When a piece I did on Wi-Fi hacking for the New York Times Magazine first came out, a good number of people posted it on various discussion sites, though I didn't know where it might appear any more. So I tried entering the submitted draft, and not the final copy-edited version. The only hits were - at the New York Times. So, Plagium will pick up examples that are close, but not exact.

Then I entered the exact text that the NYTM ran. Suddenly I had more hits, though the added ones were generally a few paragraphs with a link. If you prefer, you can choose to provide a URL for your article's location, rather than copying over the text. I think the latter makes most sense, because you reduce the number of false positives from other things that might be on the page.

Your search generates a graph in which potential infringements are bubbles on a timeline; the larger the bubble, the more likely that it is a copy. If you register with the site, you can have it look for new instances of the article over time, which suggests a smart set of steps:

1. Write and submit the article.


2. Finish edits.


3. Register the copyright.


4. Put the article into Plagium.


5. Find the uses of the article as they happen.

Clearly this can't be your only tool, but it seems like a good one and, at least for now, is free. (Though there is a Donate button, which might be wise to actually use.)

If you're interested, here's a comparison that the site PlagiarismToday (I can't get over that name) ran between Plagium, a paid infringement service called Copyscape, and Google itself. In this case, Google seemed to do far and away better, but the author says that there seemed to be a lot of duplication.

Is HuffPo Stealing Content?

According to Whet Moser on Chicago Reader, Huffington Post is lifting entire concert previews from online media covering the Chicago arts scene. According to Moser, this isn't an isolated case or two, but an ongoing series:

If you go to their Chicago Concerts page, there's a whole list of concert previews from us, Time Out Chicago, Centerstage, and the Onion's Decider--and they're just taking entire pieces.

Moser goes on to provide side-by-side examples that are just a click away. HuffPo does give credit to the source and writer, but according to Moser's post, fails to ask anyone at the publications if it's OK. Presumably none of that $25 million influx of money is going to the outlets that actually do the work, though maybe the editor who writes new headlines for each is getting paid something.

This is disgraceful. Either Huffington and her business, not social undertaking, is willing to play by the legal, ethical, and moral rules, or they are indulging in complete hypocrisy every time they skewer conservatives for supposedly not doing enough for those with too little. Or is this just an example of faux do-gooders deciding that their "missions" excuse them from the niceties that bind the rest of us? As far as I'm concerned, if you take something without permission and without payment, it's theft. And HuffPo does get something out of this, as my BNET colleague David Weir points out:

Note to Arianna: This is not kosher! Of coure, it’s doubtful that Huffington herself is even aware of this practice, but somebody in her organization knows what they are doing. This would appear to be an attempt to bolster the amount of content, which on the web correlates directly with increased traffic, and boosting SEO, which yields highly-valued organic (free) search engine traffic.

Mindboggling Copyright Infringement

Read this story in Slate about an alternative weekly in Texas that seems capable of plagiarizing every single article in an entire issue. And that's to say nothing of the web site (now apparently removed). This is so bad that it's astounding.