The Art Of Stealing The Other Guy’s Property
Aug 2nd, 2009 | 3 responses
I would suggest must reading of Ian Shapira’s story in today’s Washington Post for those of us who use the Internet to write articles and opinion pieces plundered from reliable properties such as WaPo, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and others of that ilk.
Shapira said his ego was stoked when the snarky cultural website Gawker cherry picked the best lines from his 1,500-word article on “Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace.”
When Shapira’s editor deflated his ego by asking him where’s his outrage, the reporter began reflecting on the dwindling demise of working for great newspapers with generous pay and perks, a meltdown chiefly caused by Internet freeloaders stealing this hard-earned, vetted material. Pouring salt on the wound is some sites placing ads along side their stolen stories but absolutely no compensation for the newspaper or its authors.
If you read Shapira’s entire article which I did, you must feel some pangs of guilt. If not, I suggest you take a crash course in economics, plagiarism and sensitivity training. I mean, you’re heartless, man.
At any rate, in my case, I confess crimes as accused in the article such as linking the story but failing to mention the newspaper or reporter and quoting it exhaustively throughout the post.
I promise never to do that again. I will link, attribute and keep the quotes gleamed from the story at a bare minimum. Call it Remmers Rule No. 1 in blogosphere posting. I should have known better. I have been on the flip side of this having spent 26 years in the newspaper business and never credited, let alone reimbursed, when AP and UPI and Copley News Service ran my photos and stories verbatim.
(Note: The last two paragraphs of this post were deleted by the author about an hour after publishing. They had no bearing on the original subject discussed above.)
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3 Responses to “The Art Of Stealing The Other Guy’s Property”
All “news” papers are a waste of good trees. There are no GOOD “news”papers. There are only second rate pieces of shit that are shilling for their owners viewpoint. Since all but one “news”paper is owned by right wing Merchants of Death, that have taken for their own viewpoints the vapid shit, Any Rand. Stop wasting trees, boycott newspapers. Get a real job where you can report “news” without the censoring of the MSM, or just quit. Get a job planting trees, not much pay, but not enough to repay the earth and its people for the trees wasted on your bullshit.
Die newspapers die.
I do a good bit of writing on the internet. I've even managed to get paid for some of it (and managed to sell a few ads on my own sites). I don't mind if someone uses my words or expands on my thoughts so long as they link back to me – though a mention of my name is always nice. But a link is a de facto citation of where the words/ideas come from.
On the other hand, I've issued a number of Cease and Desist orders to websites that simply ripped off my RSS feeds and published them in their entirety. I've even done this with sites that mentioned my name. It's one thing to take an idea or a few words and then add content to and around them. It's another thing to simply take someone else's work and try to make money from it.
I think you're giving Mr. Shapira far too much credit, Jerry. He's claiming a right to much, much more than is covered by copyright or under the laws and conventions against plagiarism. He's claiming to own the ideas contained in the material. The complaint about Gawker isn't that it quoted without citation but that it used the ideas.
The ideas and knowledge don't belong to the author. They are not covered by copyright. Authors who don't want their ideas replayed and reused should stop writing now.
Books, poems, stories, articles, and so on may be copyrighted and those rights belong to the author. The ideas in the books, poems, stories, articles, and so on go into the public domain. Authors who claim otherwise are pirates.