RIEDER: ANOTHER OUTBREAK OF PLAGIARISM

Original Story:  USAToday.com

Talleyrand, the noted French statesman and diplomat, died in 1838, well before the advent of the Internet era. But his aphorism is as useful now as it was then.

"This is worse than a crime," he famously said, "it's a blunder."

We are in the midst of one of those periodic clusters of plagiarism cases. BuzzFeed fires a writer for serial plagiarism. A veteran New York Times reporter uses material from Wikipedia without attribution. And U.S. Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., is discovered to have borrowed work from elsewhere for his master's thesis.

That plagiarism is morally wrong is beyond argument. It's theft. But beyond that, it's just so stupid.

There always has been the risk of getting caught, even back in Talleyrand's day. But in the Internet era, the odds have increased astronomically. Your audience is worldwide. Someone is likely to notice. The Internet culture is packed with citizen media critics, and they are likely to track you down, which is exactly what happened in the BuzzFeed saga.

The flip side, of course, is that the Internet makes plagiarism so easy. Encountering writer's block? An infinite array of material is just a cut and a paste away. You don't even have to spend any energy writing down or typing all those words.

But what a price you will pay.

The BuzzFeed case dramatizes how Web detectives can bring you down. It also illustrates the danger of taunting.

Benny Johnson, BuzzFeed's viral politics editor (now there's a title), brought on his own demise when he accused another website, the Independent Journal Review, of stealing his stuff. The matter in question involved an item about former president George H.W. Bush's eye-catching red and white socks. (I know.)

That inspired two anonymous Twitter users to look into Johnson's work, they told Talking Points Memo in an e-mail interview. But they also were motivated by concerns about how BuzzFeed does business. They created a blog and published their findings about Johnson, which were quite damning. Soon Johnson was gone.

BuzzFeed has attracted huge amounts of traffic with its preternatural ability to create endless streams of viral content. Some of it is clever; some if it is silly; some of it is sleazy. As I write this, it is featuring such fare as "19 Women Reveal Their Most Cringe-Worthy Sexual Experiences" and "Look At This Pit Bull Princess and Have A More Fabulous Day."

But as BuzzFeed has evolved, it has also embraced serious newsgathering, covering national politics, establishing foreign bureaus and launching an investigative reporting unit. To his credit, after initially seeming to downplay the situation, Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith did the right thing. Following a BuzzFeed investigation of Johnson's handiwork, which found 41 instances of copying material from others, Smith dispatched the reporter. The site's forays into serious news made it incumbent on the organization to take journalistic standards seriously, Smith said. And he's right.

BuzzFeed has attracted huge amounts of traffic with its preternatural ability to create endless streams of viral content. Some of it is clever; some if it is silly; some of it is sleazy. As I write this, it is featuring such fare as "19 Women Reveal Their Most Cringe-Worthy Sexual Experiences" and "Look At This Pit Bull Princess and Have A More Fabulous Day."

But as BuzzFeed has evolved, it has also embraced serious newsgathering, covering national politics, establishing foreign bureaus and launching an investigative reporting unit. To his credit, after initially seeming to downplay the situation, Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith did the right thing. Following a BuzzFeed investigation of Johnson's handiwork, which found 41 instances of copying material from others, Smith dispatched the reporter. The site's forays into serious news made it incumbent on the organization to take journalistic standards seriously, Smith said. And he's right.

Germany passes "Re-publishing" Bill

Story first appeared on Ars Technica -

Google can post "short excerpts" freely—but what that means, nobody knows.

The lower house of the German parliament, known as the Bundestag, has approved a new bill that would require search engines to pay a license fee for re-publishing content longer than "individual words or short excerpts." The bill passed by a vote of 293 to 243, with three abstentions.

However, the law does not define exactly what such a “snippet” would entail. For the law to take effect, it would need to be ratified by the upper house of the German parliament, the Bundesrat. By all accounts, this bill is a watered-down version of what had originally been lobbied for by the German publishing and media industry.

Not surprisingly, Google has opposed this law and proposals like it in neighboring France.

“As a result of today’s vote, ancillary copyright in its most damaging form has been stopped,” Google said in a statement. “However, the best outcome for Germany would be no new legislation because it threatens innovation, particularly for start-ups. It’s also not necessary because publishers and Internet companies can innovate together, just as Google has done in many other countries.”

Still, the publishing industry seems to be fairly satisfied that they managed to get something passed through the Bundestag.

“With the right legal conditions and the technical tools provided by the Linked Content Coalition, it will be easy to access and use content legally,” the European Publishers Council said in a statement (PDF) on Friday. “This will mean that publishers will have the incentive to continue to populate the internet with high-quality, authoritative, diverse content and to support new, innovative business models for online content.”