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7/21/2005 10:43
I read an article on MarketingSherpa today about re-blogging.
In it, the author, Anne Holland said:
"...recently I've begun to see an ugly trend emerging.
Bloggers have begun cutting and pasting the entire text of our articles in their blogs. Sometimes it appears as though they wrote the article, sometimes they give a little credit "from MarketingSherpa." Either way, I have to contact them with a little cease-and-desist note or risk losing the intellectual property that our company is built on...."
I've always said there's a light side and a dark side to the blogosphere. But that it's also self-cleansing, which is essential to the integrity of the whole thing.
C'mon, people. Proper attribution and the courtesy to wrap your own thoughts around the essence of any article is mandatory. There are too many tools and honest people out there to ever think you'll get away with fraud.
In fact, a dear friend in the blogosphere, Meryl passed along a great idea that I'd like to share with everyone. It's a site called Change This. And they believe good ideas will spread, because people are optimists (and basically good).
Take the time to go have a look. Be optimistic.
And above all, be honest.
Posted by at July 21, 2005 10:43 AM
Comments
the head lemur email - theheadlemur.typepad.com
Cut and paste will be with us until I die.
Her article is offensive on so many levels I had to post an Opinion
theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2005/07/anne_holland_th.html
Janet email - www.marqui.com
Hey, great to hear from you again. Your post ought to generate some heat - thank you!
Michael O'Connor Clarke email - corante.com/flackster
Reading Ms. Holland's opus actually inspires in me a fervent urge to copy and paste as much of the Marketing Sherpa site into my blog as I can possibly fit.
The Head Lemur's response is so well expressed, it's kind of hard for me to add much more.
It's understandable for the Marketing Sherpa guys to be incensed by people lifting their content wholesale and republishing it without attribution. I would be annoyed too. (A similiar kind of thing happened to me once at university, when one of my profs published an essay of mine as his own. Grrrrr. But that's a different kind of plagiarism)
It's the tone and manner of Ms. Holland's response that burns - particularly in the case of what she calls "genuine fans". Her reaction is heavy-handed and disproportionate, to say the least.
Copying & pasting, hyperlinking, adding commentaries and corollaries - these are the very core of the web and an integral part of online dialogue.
Given: re-blogging an entire article, passing it off as your own work without attribution at all, is clueless, detestable, and lame. But spreading good content to a wider audience, <i>with</i> appropriate attribution and pointers to the source - that's just how the web works.
I'll agree that "quoting" an entire article is dumb - much better to send the traffic back to the original site -- as long as the original site doesn't insist on shutting up its goodies behind a paywall, or building linkrot into its articles, of course.
But dropping a weasel-worded cease-and-desist note onto the heads of "genuine fans" is dumber still.
</rant>
There's a link <a href="weblogs.about.com/od/issuesanddiscussions/a/copyrighttips.htm">here</a> that might prove useful to some. I wouldn't necessarily endorse all the advice on this page of "14 Copyright Tips for Bloggers", but there's some good common sense in there. In particular, tip #10: <b>"Ask yourself whether it's worth bothering about."</b>
:-)
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