The whole thing started when Jody Rosen over at Slate discovered an article of his reproduced nearly verbatim in a weekly newspaper from Montgomery County, Texas. The Bulletin, he explains, made some minor modifications — but largely just lifted his copy and put it under its own staff member’s byline.

Rosen investigated further and found chunks of content from two other publications within the same story — and it didn’t stop there. Some creative Googling uncovered article after article in the Bulletin matching previously published stories, almost word-for-word.

The ordeal gets more interesting as it goes on. Rosen ended up having a couple of conversations with the publisher, but never got a real answer. The publisher, he says, stopped returning his calls — and now, the Bulletin’s web site has mysteriously disappeared.

In his engaging, funny, and well-written account, Rosen takes us through his mixed emotions: Could this have been a big joke? Could such a paper — one purporting to have been around since 1969 — actually have built itself on such journalism practices? Or are those practices, Rosen suggests, perhaps not as evil as they seem? Maybe, he suggests, the Bulletin is “bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media.”

The Inquisitr has certainly seen its share of discussions about the line between 2.0-style blogging and good old-fashioned splogging. This is the first time, though, I’ve seen the same kind of argument come up in the world of print. Sure, at a glance, any journalist would label the Bulletin as a plagiarist based on Rosen’s discoveries — but could it, in fact, be doing the same thing sometimes argued as acceptable within web publishing? Maybe it’s just a step ahead of the rest of the newspaper publishing industry. Where does one draw the line?

The case does raise some interesting questions. In the end, though, I think most would agree to call it content theft. The Web may have loosened some rules and opened some opportunities for sharing, but there’s a difference between excerpting with due credit and downright ripping off. Lifting someone else’s words and passing them off as your own is plain ol’ plagiarism, no matter how you spin it — or how many different sources you combine.

That’s my take, and you can quote me on it…though you’d better properly attribute the words.

No related posts.

The blog at seriouslytech.com (no hard links from me) republishes content in full from the following sites: All Things D, arstechnica, BoomTown, Carnage4Life, Futuristic Play, Jemima Kiss, Lifehacker, Louis Gray, Mashable, Om Malik, readwriteweb, Robert Scoble, Ryan Spoon, TechCrunch, Techdirt and The Inquisitr. There are also other sites ripping even more content as well: seriouslymedia.com, seriouslymac.com, seriouslypolitics.com and seriouslywallstreet.com.

Until yesterday the SeriouslyTech site republished posts with no link back to the original site, and it was only after I mentioned this privately were links implemented to the sites featured, but even then it was only links to Feedburner feed entries, not the site itself. Notably linking to a site doesn’t grant full reprint rights to a blog despite what some in the spam blogging community like to claim.

Teare has explained to me privately the current status of the “project” and what it aims to achieve, but asked that the whole discussion remain off the record, so I cant actually print his defense (not that there could ever be a strong defense for splogging). This is not a Feedreading product like Feedly or a meme service like Onespot: at the moment it’s a WordPress blog ripping content from other people without permission and not even giving due credit back. It’s a number of blogs that are being fed into FriendFeed, that offer commenting on other people’s full content, and even goes as far as offering buttons for the splog entries to be submitted to social voting sites.

I’ve met Keith before and he’s always struck me as being a smart guy, so who ever convinced him that doing this is a good thing (he’s not doing this alone, but it’s all in his name) needs to be quickly purged. I’m sorry Keith, but I’ve gone after companies and people for far less than this (Shyftr comes to mind). What ever this site aims to be in the future, it needs to die now before you start getting the lawyer letters from the very annoyed people you are currently stealing from.

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