I’ve written before about my fears that Google searches, RSS feeds and other tools that, wonderfully, bring us more information than ever before ALSO enable theft of expression like never before.

In the “analog” era, plagiarism was hard work. You had to hand-write or type the prose in front of you, a tedious exercise that generally limited the practice to a middle-schooler copying a paragraph from a World Book encyclopedia. But things have changed. In the digital era: (1) All it takes is Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to reproduce somebody else’s work. (2) There are so many works available to people that the odds have increased that anyone will notice.

Slate’s Jody Rosen has an eye-opening piece, cleverly titled “Dude, You Stole My Article,” and in it he offers painstaking detail (the sign of a true reporter, as opposed to the average blogger) of an alternative newspaper in Texas that has apparently for several years produced nearly all of its copy without authorization from other published works, from Slate to USA Today, from The Washington Post to The Boston Globe.

Rosen stumbled across this because the paper stole one of his articles and a reader brought it to his attention. Then, curious, he uncovered this amazing history of theft. As Rosen puts it:

Indeed, I wonder: In purely statistical terms, do the articles in the Montgomery County Bulletin amount to the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism?

In statistical terms, possibly. But it’s more disturbing on another level. The scandals involving Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass all involved major publications, raising their profile, but they also involved mainly making stuff up (Blair specialized in both). With the Montgomery County, Texas Bulletin exposed by Slate (I can’t link to the Bulletin’s web site because it was taken down after the Slate article appeared) we have a business model that has embraced the cut-and-paste culture piecemeal. Why write original prose when you can grab someone else’s?

Of course, we already see this online. The non-profit (yes, everyone, it’s a non-profit) Associated Press uses Attributor to track its content, which appears in many places where it isn’t authorized. As Rosen notes, many successful blogs are basically built on links and excerpts from others’ content. (It’s a fine line — have I done a cut-and-paste on the Slate piece? I know this post falls under fair use commentary, but it’s important to me that I bring added value as well.)

We could be seeing more of this business model; it may be out there in other places as yet undiscovered. But my concern is larger than just the idea of print-and-digital papers recycling other works, as terrible as that is. My concern is that the very fact that this is being done is reflective of a growing mind-set, namely if it’s on the web, I can take it. We see that with prose. We see that with music. We see that with video. We see that with software. We see that with photographs and other visual arts.

The world doesn’t work that way, and the Internet doesn’t work that way, no matter how much people want to say this evolutionary (not revolutionary) technology has “changed everything.” Creative works have value, whether it’s a sound recording or a news article. After all, without those news articles, what would bloggers have to link to?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 10:41 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, creators, fair use, internet, piracy, property rights, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.