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Topic: In a Plagiarism Pickle
| Author | Message |
| wordhooker | Posted – 6/13/2006 1:40:57 PM | show profile | email poster While searching online for a men?s magazine article I wrote a few years ago, I came across another similarly titled article on a popular web site. I clicked on it and was shocked to see it was essentially MY article with a few little tweaks thrown in. It wasn?t only the concept that was stolen, but the writer actually used some of the exact phrases I wrote. I tried tracking down an editor for the site but came up empty-handed and did something sneaky that I?m not very proud of: I found the writer on MySpace and sent her a message, telling her I enjoy reading her work. (Note: since my last name was not on my profile, she did not recognize me as the girl whose article she stole.) I told her I was also a writer and asked whether she would be willing to give me her editor?s name/e-mail address so that I could pitch him. Well, she gave it up, but now that I have the means to let the editor know that his writer is a big, fat copycat, I?m feeling guilty about lying to get his info. So what do I do? Should I still e-mail the editor? Come clean to the writer? Or just forget about it? I don?t know whether snitching on her is going to make me feel better or worse. Any advice is appreciated. |
| wordhooker | Posted – 6/13/2006 1:44:11 PM | show profile Sorry about all the question marks. I copied and pasted from Word and apostrophes don't carry over, apparently. |
| crackersncheese | Posted – 6/13/2006 1:47:04 PM | show profile I'd email the editor and have them remove the copied article from online. Even if it's clear to readers that yours was written first, I can't imagine that a near-identical article online by someone else will help your portfolio/reputation much. |
| flipflap | Posted – 6/13/2006 2:45:20 PM | show profile I agree with the previous poster. Send the editor a copy of your article in which the pub. date is evident and ask them to remove the copycat article. Having that copycat piece on a popular web site might lead readers to believe that you were the one who copied from them. Especially when pub dates are not prominent or just not posted on the page! This happened to me a couple of times. I always emailed the magazine and they removed the piece right away. It never would've occurred to me to contact the writer. Since you already did, don't feel guilty about it. Besides, s/he'll doesn't know who you are and won't connect your email to the editor with the MySpace admirer. Once my editor spotted what we referred to thereafter as the copycat article. It was abut a very unusual subject, but we couldn't do anything about it because even though the copycat used my source, she tweaked the theme just slightly, and didn't actually plagiarize the text. I have to say if I ever query the magazine that published her piece, I'd be tempted to include a bio note that I was the first to cover such unusual subjects as X, Y and Z. with X, of course, being the subject of that piece. |
| Lotus665 | Posted – 6/13/2006 7:17:58 PM | show profile To the last poster, covering the same topic with one of the same sources and using one's own words and changing the angle is not plagiarism! It's simply another story on the same topic by someone else. Obscure topics by nature will only have a few sources that are experts, and nobody "owns" a source. The OP's story sounds worse, but again you can't own concepts. The verbatim passages are another story -- that's plagiarism. So I'm a bit confused here. Was it also that the structure and ALL the sources were the same as well as a lot of identical language? |
| flipflap | Posted – 6/13/2006 8:21:38 PM | show profile yes, Lotus, I know the person who wrote what my editor brought to my attention as "a copycat article" did not plagiarize my piece. The writer called up ALL of the same sources, made the same points, and used the same angle, by the way. Angle was tweaked just a tiny bit. But she did not steal my sentences. That's why I said there was nothing we could do. She was not plagiarist. But I agree with my editor that she was a copycat. Some would say she was merely unoriginal. This happened long before what MB dubbed the "copycat Kaavya," so the words "copycat" and "plagiarist" are probably synonymous to MBers at this point. |
| overthehillwriter | Posted – 6/14/2006 1:33:22 AM | show profile | email poster Flip, agree with Lotus on this one. Sounds like an advanced case of flattery, otherwise known as imitation. If the research was redone, the worst you could say is they were not terribly original -- or that you did it first and better. We have all been THERE. I once wrote a seminal piece about a newish landmark that many others would follow me in writing about. I was flattered in an amused/indignant way to see one writer had borrowed the entire article, giving different examples. The only real plagiarism in it was a phrase in which I described something as a "paragon of style and beauty" or something like that. (Would have to dig through my old, old clips to recall it.) Really, who would conjure THAT up? (By the way, feel free to use it. You have my permission!) |
| zinny | Posted – 6/14/2006 8:44:41 AM | show profile Stealing ideas *is plagiarism Just because ideas can't be copyrighted doesn't mean that it's ethical to plagiarize. The more obscure the topic, and the closer the use of structure/construction/word choice, the easier to identify that there's plagiarism. From Merriam-Webster: "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source" |
| JimmyG | Posted – 6/14/2006 11:00:34 AM | show profile An idea has to be truly original and novel in execution to be considered protected material, even in the moral sense. When I was an editor I used to publish articles that were amazingly like others that came out in the same time frame as sheer coincidence, based on current events and developments. Sometimes we all just look to the same pool of experts or the same motherlode source because they're the ones out there. I've been told by editors, when asking about possible sources for stories, to look at particular industry publications to see who they quote. One editor told me to search the NY Times and see who they were quoting these days. And then there are those who take concepts or inspirations from published works and go a step further with them or otherwise make them their own. I'm not defending them, but I used to work for a company that made its living ripping off popular books and doing "me-too" titles. I've often read articles and felt that the author had used one of mine as a source. Id be indignant if I could say with a straight face that I never, ever used another published work as background info. |
| chucho | Posted – 6/14/2006 12:35:36 PM | show profile "Borrowing" from competitors is very common, not just in journalism. It has been my observation that when it occurs it often comes down to an assessment of various factors: the severity of the plagiarism (or copyright violation, in the cases of stealing creative license), the level of finanical hurt caused by the act, and, ultimately, how much effort a victim wants to put in to an action that will usually result in little vindication, especially if you're paying a lawyer $120 to write a letter. (In the case of stealing design elements, sometimes the perpetrator even settles witht he plaitiff with "I will stop reproducing this item once I sell through my current stock of produced items" essenitally allowing the perpetrator to get away with the ruse to some degree.) In the case of your story, I think the best you can hope for is having them take down the article in question and hurting the reputation of the author of the article in question with said publication. That may be enough for you to pursue this issue, taking up your time. As far as being concerned for your deception -- hell, you're too kind! Besides the person being a plagiariast, anyone who has a MySpace profile probably deserves to be misled in the same way that most if not all people who promote themselves on social networking websites are "spinning" facts about themselves and being creative with their descriptions. ("Gee, which favorite food would make me seem really cool?" "What little adorable quip should I put here?" "Which of these 40 pictures I just took of myself at arm's length with my Cannon SureShot makes me look hottest -- the one where I look pensive, or the one where I've pouted my lips?") As far as I'm concerned, the fact the person is advertising herself on the web, then silly enough to provide information to a stranger who contacted her through her MySpace profile . . . she's asking for it and could probably use an object lesson in a.) stealing other people's work, and b.) being loose with her own privacy over an increasingly notorious (and perpetually lame and misleading) web-based social-networking "tool". Well, that's just my OP anyway... |
| pinky | Posted – 6/16/2006 11:42:12 PM | show profile When I writer takes all (or most) of the reporting/ideas from another story, but changes the words around so it's "not plagiarism," there's still something not right going on. I know there's nothing that can be done legally. But the person who wrote the original story put a lot of time into finding the right sources and picking the right information (not just making the actual words sound pretty), and it just doesn't seem fair to piggyback on someone else's work like that. Of course, I think there's a difference between reinterviewing a source or taking one piece of information, and borrowing wholescale from another article. The latter happens all the time, and I think it's important to let editors and writers know that it's not OK. So, I think you should calmly bring this up to the editor. He/she probably won't be thrilled about paying a writer to produce an unoriginal story, so you might be doing him/her a favor. (I used to be an assigning ed., and I would want to know.) |
| Nikongirl | Posted – 6/17/2006 11:31:39 AM | show profile sadly not unusual... I'm a music journalist/photographer and I find it extremely frustrating when, in doing research of a subject, I find the same bio information used exactly as written on the artists/label website in numerous other articles claiming to be 'written' by so and so when they haven't taken the time to even pretend to change a word or direction or keep digging until there's more information or something new to say. I have to admit I was shocked that this goes on and people get away with it, claiming to be 'writers' when all they are doing is stealing work from the internet. What happened to personal integrity? |
| Nikongirl | Posted – 6/17/2006 11:35:58 AM | show profile p.s. I meant to add that you shouldn't feel bad about contacting the editor -(you didn't do ANYthing wrong) I would step it up and let the person know that she plagiarized your article. Maybe she'll be properly humiliated and never do it again.... |
| Lotus665 | Posted – 7/13/2006 10:07:18 AM | show profile clarification I agree that actual copycatting is lazy and borders on unethical. But what I'm sort of defending is that someone may, coincidentally, have discovered the same topic as you, completely separately, and pursued it, finding some of the same sources along the way...It's important to distinguish between the two scenarios. I saw a piece in an environmental magazine a few months back that was very similar to one I'd written earlier re: the topic and angle. Certainly copycatting could have been going on, but it's also quite possible the writer stumbled on the topic herself and (since it's pretty new/obscure and has only a few key sources yet) reported it independently. That's why ultimately I decided to chill about it. And why I don't think you should snitch, because you will never really know what happened. Finally, to better protect ourselves, we should all copyright each piece we write to which we haven't sold all rights. |
| mailbag | Posted – 7/13/2006 10:55:51 AM | show profile | email poster First to the punch? Interesting discussion. I ran an investigative story in Feb, it hit the wires and caused a big stir for Youtube. In April the AP ran a rehash of the same story, same Youtube conflict only with moderated "porn" to appeal to more general audience. As we published it first online, that electronic time stamp proves who was first. Oddly enough, and to my surprise it remains the No.1 traffic driver to the website for the year to date. Is being first good enough wordhook? Did you protect yourself by publishing electronically? Its a nasty war in my opinion, but writers have to protect themselves as part of this game. Copyright somehow, publish on a private electronic server that isn't picked up by search (or is) but at least maintain your first to the punch rights. No one can take that away from you. |
| upcoaster | Posted – 7/13/2006 2:57:42 PM | show profile Confronting prose poachers ... can leave you frustrated. I did a book review once -- late 90s -- for an inflight. It appealed to the book's publisher and was excerpted (one of those "praise for" deals) on the jacket of the author's subsequent book. It evidently also appealed to a writer at a big Boston daily, who treated my review like Cliff Notes and cribbed like a demon in his own review, only *slightly* altering complete sentences (including the one that became a book-jacket excerpt). Forget landing on a phrase like "paragon of style," or whatever. I had a line citing, for comparision to the writer's work, "the participatory spirit of Hunter S. Thompson." Lifted. Several other chains of words too, along with the general structure and tone. I went first to my editors, who shared my indignation but were essentially marketing types (this was custom publishing) with little inclination to wade into it. So I sent copies of each article to Columbia Journalism Review (hoping, I guess, for one of their "darts"). I shot off a blustery, Norman Mailer-esque fax ("my, don't we think alike, dick?") to the writer himself (no reply), and I lodged a complain with the offending paper's ombudsman -- at the time some doddering old Front Page kinda guy -- who eventually wrote back saying (surprise!) the paper saw no evidence of copying. By then I was behind on two other assignments so I shrugged it off. The poacher's byline disappeared from that paper for months, however. He resurfaced much later at another paper in town. |
