First, Wired editor Chris Anderson drew notice for the content of his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which, according to its summary on Amazon.com, makes the case that businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them.

Oh, sweet irony.

Yesterday, Valleywag reported that Anderson pinched entire passages of his manuscript from Wikipedia (a free, Web-based information source, for those out of the loop).

Sadly, rather than turning the imbroglio into one big meta piece of performance art, Anderson backtracked, claiming he never intended to do it. After the Virginia Quarterly Review first noted the plagiarism, Valleywag reported Anderson as saying that the book's foonotes were killed "at the 11th hour," replaced by attribution within the body of the text. Wikipedia footnotes apparently failed to make the leap.

It's sort of like if Abbie Hoffman had claimed after the fact that he actually meant to suggest that people buy his book, but a last-minute publishing error led to some erroneous cover copy.

Mistakes happen, to Wired editors and everyone else. Our would-be amusement at a potential alternative explanation, however, pales in comparison to the publicity that Mr. Anderson could have received had he played these particular cards better. Perhaps next time.