CityPages Complains About Plagiarism?
This is interesting. CityPages is complaining about a publication, One Nation News, lifting stories from CityPages (A-List, specifically) then putting their own name on it.
Last Sunday, I received a concerned email from a longtime freelancer for City Pages. She had received a forwarded email from One Nation News, a website dedicated to covering minority issues and interests in the state of Minnesota. Imagine her surprise when she saw her A List word for word in the newsletter with Joe Johnson in the byline. “What should I do? The guy even signed his name to it,” she lamented.
While I support their beef with One Nation News, it also reminds me of CityPages’ own issues with intellectual property swiping, such as this, and this from October along with this from February.
Born-again IP respecters?
Well, not necessarily born-again. What’s the deal with this unattributed photo of a steak at Manny’s? According to the original photo on Flickr, it belongs to a science teacher from Chicago who snapped the snot one year ago today.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:01 am
Definitely hypocrisy, but even though legally it’s not really any different, posting a Flickr photo without attribution seems the lesser of two evils when compared to claiming a full article under a different byline. That could just be my own bias as a writer though.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:22 am
Definitely hypocrisy, but even though legally it’s not really any different, posting a Flickr photo without attribution seems the lesser of two evils when compared to claiming a full article under a different byline. That could just be my own bias as a writer though.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 am
Definitely hypocrisy, but even though legally it’s not really any different, posting a Flickr photo without attribution seems the lesser of two evils when compared to claiming a full article under a different byline. That could just be my own bias as a writer though.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:45 am
Snapped the snot. Excellent euphemism.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Ed, come on. Using an unattributed photo for a fly-by-night blog post is light years difference from someone repeatedly taking print copy from the paper written by various freelancers and putting their OWN name on it.
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Born again…yikes, I can’t get past the image of City Pages if it were to become a born again publication.
* shudder *
But, that is the next natural step for them, isn’t it? Come to Jesus CP, you need Him…really.
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@jay, I guess that depends which side of the fence you’re standing on. I know that I don’t like having my content stolen by supposedly professional journalists. I only provided one example. Would it take more to convince you that it’s an issue? Did you check the links where they’ve ripped photos from the AP and StarTribune?
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
As a long-time snot-snapper myself, I have to agree.
July 22nd, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Emily Kaiser herself was talking about the plagiarism story on ‘In the Stream with Mischke’ this afternoon. I left a comment on the show notes regarding your having caught Emily herself plagiarizing information and provided a link to your bits about it……but the comment disappeared after about 45 minutes. Hm.
July 22nd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Couldn’t Hutton (or whoever posted the article for her) have found a higher quality photo of a steak to rip off? Gross! They could have easily grabbed a screenshot from the Manny’s site.
As a writer who has to find images on the web every day, it CAN be difficult, but it’s not that hard to get creative. I am also a photographer so I’ve got a lot of stock images of my own, and am pretty sensitive to copyright infringement and crediting. I do, on occasion, rip random stock art-looking images off in a pinch, so it’s not like I’m trying to be all holier-than-thou about it. Image usage is a pain in the ass.
However, as a writer, I would be (and have been) way more irritated by someone plagiarizing my words than ignorantly grabbing one of my photos off of google image search — it’s so much more of a direct, calculated rip off. And should be punishable by bitch-slapping and/or public humiliation.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:49 pm
It’s always different when it’s their own IP being stolen. It’s ok to use someone’s photo without their permission and then only pay 1/6th the invoice when you get caught but I guarantee you that these papers would chase down, to the end of the earth, anyone using their stuff w/o permission.
Shitty situation all around