

Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism - razorburn
http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

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gruseom
Given Anderson's response that he screwed up and his plausible explanation,
the article's gotcha title and the way that it's structured (first as a
pompous "investigation", then springing this critical information on the
reader at the end) strike me as a little unfair. Obviously what he did was
wrong, but it was pretty clearly sloppiness rather than theft or deceit.
(Edit: either that or a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.)

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ojbyrne
Sorry, but if you're trained as a journalist, it is.

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sachinag
This. How on earth you could have an explanation that's essentially "I relied
on my memory to figure out the quoted cites after the fact that I deleted the
cites _because I couldn't find a fucking cite format_ " is insane. The dude
pretty willfully plagarized as far as I'm concerned. I mean, seriously,
fucking Google has this as their first hit for [cite online sources]:
<http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html>

Now, look, Doris Kearns Goodwin got nailed plagarizing, too. She did her
penance, and now she's back on TV and everything after putting out Team of
Rivals, which was seminal. Anderson will have to do something similar.

What's striking is that if you make it to the top of the profession, you can
get away with this. If you're 28 and toiling to work your way up, it's a death
sentence.

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furyg3
Screw 28, if you're a high school senior you'd miss graduation for something
like this.

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pchristensen
Caught another plagiarist a few days ago here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661875>

Seems like you could catch a lot of plagiarism by doing a sentence-by-sentence
google search of a submitted work. Probably against Google's ToS but it would
probably turn up a lot of dirt.

~~~
anigbrowl
You're onto something here - and Google has already digitized many, many
books. This has enormous potential value as a collaborative endeavor; Google
might not object if they were made a party to it and the search conducted at a
low intensity. Alternatively, some kind of peer-based comparison a la BOINC
ought to be possible. It has value beyond simple plagiarism detection.

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jcl
This is the same guy who fabricated a quote from Peter Norvig to fill in a
logical gap in his article:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492376>

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tokenadult
The sidebar displays of textual comparisons in the submitted article are very
interesting, as is the attribution of the Wikipedia entries.

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pj
Well, if he did this with content licensed under the ShareAlike, then he has
to release his book the same way. Right?

 _Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may
distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible
license._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-
ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License)

~~~
gojomo
It doesn't work that way; copyleft/ShareAlike is not a automatic trap that can
be applied to your work against your will. It's a condition for permitted
reuse.

If you violate the condition, then you have no permission to use. Then, since
you've used without permission, the copyright holder can sue you for damages,
and/or to stop/mitigate the violation.

The copyright holder _might_ propose that relicensing your work under
copyleft/ShareAlike would be sufficient penance for them to settle. But it's
not automatic -- "you used X, thus your work in now licensed as X demanded".

~~~
pj
So if he had said, "I got this from this wikipedia article," then his book
would also have been ShareAlike?

Maybe he didn't want that... I don't understand really, did he think no one
would find out? What is his response? I looked on thelongtail.com but don't
see anything.

~~~
gojomo
No. Only if he says, "I license my work under copyleft/ShareAlike", is it
under ShareAlike.

Anderson's response is quoted at the end of the article.

Roughly he says: "Whoops, we copied it by mistake, it should have been quoted
or rewritten. We'll correct online and in future printings."

It doesn't in any way change his copyright/license. (He may very well offer
the book for free, given his schtick, but there's no automatic compulsion to.
And if you copied his work without permission, you couldn't argue "but he did
the same thing" or "he accidentally gave me permission".)

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devin
No one takes into account that it may have been his publisher's wish to not
include wikipedia citations.

~~~
jon_dahl
That could be, but it would still be a violation of Wikipedia's licensing.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-
ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License)

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Tichy
Do I read it correctly that to quote from Wikipedia, the work containing the
quote has to be put under the ShareAlike license, too? (Similar to the GPL?).
I am quite shocked, as I had expected the license for Wikipedia stuff to be
more lenient.

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billswift
I have tried (am trying) to write a book, and find Anderson's explanation
totally believable. Search and Replace is NOT your friend if you don't use it
intelligently. What apparently happened is the publisher decided not to use
footnotes, but instead of using the footnotes to locate the relevant cites and
fixing them (citing them inline or removing them) first, deleted all
footnotes, then they tried to locate all the cited text from memory. Poor
planning and sloppy editing was the direct cause of the plagiarism, not
intent.

~~~
tokenadult
If the author keeps his raw notes in the proper way for a nonfiction book
manuscript, the publisher can't undermine him in the claimed way.

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sfphotoarts
someone should do an LCS on the electronic version and submit the results to
Wired :)

