Virtuous Theft
January 17th, 2006
I’m back after a long and entirely undeserved rest (the best kind) in the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. New Mexico, I learned, has license plates that say “USA” on them, apparently because Santa Fe natives were being picked up by state trooopers in Texas and being threatened with deportation back to “Mexico.” This sort of antediluvian ignorance explains why so many people are getting away with plagiarism, and why it might not be the worst thing in the world — at least it gets the word out.
Wikipedia has taken some more bruises because some reporter in Hawaii, not content with recycling press releases (which apparently is not plagiarism), lifted an article wholesale from the online repository. The fact that this is news (his lifting of other articles from E! Online and NPR gets a secondary mention) is just another form of plagiarism — the slavish repetition of buzz words. And yes, this post is another example of that.
It’s not just reporters, of course. They’re just the ones with a body of ethics that punishes the ones who get caught doing it.
In the SEO industry, the quickest way to get to the top of the rankings is to copy the hard work of the other guys who figured out how to do it. Zunch, on their news page, promotes as “press”, without any apparent irony, a ClickZ article which wonders about their “Recon” product which makes it easy to steal other people’s hard work. No headlines here.
Another stirring example of profiteering from others’ work comes from the domain world, where sTypo is promoting a program that will generate misspellings of words, and check to see whether they’re being used to generate revenue yet. Their example of a word to misspell is “Yahoo”, a trademarked name. So if you’ve spent hours thinking up a great new name for a company, and then by the sweat of your brow made it worth something, you’ll be thrilled to know that there’s some software out there poised to rip you off.
Much of the blogosphere is little more than “virtuous” plagiarism, where A-listers sit with their eyes glued to the wires looking for stories other people wrote that they can pass off on their own blogs — with attribution, of course, which makes it all right.
But plagiarism is an old tradition, and original thought is so rare that if we disallowed it entirely there might be very little to read online.
From our Net point of view, it’s interesting to note that “plagiarism” come from the Latin plagirius, “kidnapper”; from plagium, “kidnapping”; and ultimately from plaga, which means “net”.
