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Bloggers' Plagiarism Scientifically Proven
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Few Original Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
I've found that there are very few original thoughts or ideas, and very few people who come up with them. It isn't a matter of plagerism. It's just that there are only so many viable ideas out there. And the more that are already taken, the harder it is to come up with a new one. If you reach too far just to have an original thought, then you end up a wacko.
It isn't just bloggers.
Bloggers (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's the fact that the more popular bloggers put their ideas across in a clearer way than the less know bloggers..
it's not the idea that's important.. it's how you present it.
Simon.
Steal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, horrible plagiarism! (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't say!
I suppose we're going to start burning Shakespeare's works because they were blatantly stolen from other writers, right?
Idea modification and adaptation is not plagiarism - much of human progress in the arts has happened because of this phenomenon, and the internet neither started nor ended it.
Doesn't work (Score:1, Insightful)
"gay serfin parents" or something, a bunch of CNN sites, but no blogs copying other blogs
Mod this -1 troll if you want but that's kinda weird.
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not just blogs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not stealing... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's what Open Source is all about (Score:4, Insightful)
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just yesterday I heard a radio news story about how thousands of people are dying from something or other every year. When I looked into the data deeper, it was an estimate (read: ideologically motivated wild ass guess) by some political group, and had no actual science behind it whatsoever. But it was still just reported without any thought because the group issued a press release.
Nerds vs. Jocks (Score:1, Insightful)
Everyone here should know that popularity is inversely proportionate to intelligence. Only intelligent people like other intelligent people. The idiots are just resentful.
It isn't stealing - (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, there are the cut&pasters that couldn't come up with an original thought of their own if they had to.
Just my $.03 (inflation is everywhere)
Re:Next Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's kind of the difference between the tabloid news paper format, and the tabloid style of news reporting. There are some credible newspapers, such as the Boston Herald which publish in the tabloid shape. Meanwhile, the not so credible The Onion has a broadsheet shape.
LOTS OF MONEY.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bloggers (Score:2, Insightful)
Aggregators (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, lemme get this straight.. (Score:2, Insightful)
But if you download copyrighted music off of kazaa, you're all oh-so-quick to point out "it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement!"
Anyhow, what HP didn't mention: people with boring enough lives devoted to online diaries, are all likely to come up with the same stupid ideas. Its not so much stealing as in they're all equally boring.
I bet you think you're the only one who thought to wipe his ass with a washcloth to save the trees. Well you're not!
Re:Few Original Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
If memory serves, a 19th century sociologist by the name of "Darde" posited that out of 100 people, 1 is truly creative and the remaining 99 are echoic.
The research in question suggests the same. And so does the nature of television.
Re:next thing you know... (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be Chuck Berry, youngun'...
Re:Yes, horrible plagiarism! (Score:4, Insightful)
computers would be nothing like they are today (nor as cheap as) if it wasnt for "stealing" and "plagiarism" My god, Compaq stile IBM's IP and shout be punished severly! OMG! Texas Instruments STOLE the idea of a processor from Intel!
today too many people are worrying about how to make the most money with the least effort..
How about being proud of the fact that your idea is so good that everyone want's to copy it? and use that supposedly superior brain to tink up another one...
that is why every "invention" I come up with I market the hell out of until I see copies show up on the market, then simply switch to something else after selling the rights cheaply to one of the copycats. (no I wont tell any of you what items I invented, many are gizmos for hunters and camping/hiking)
The louder someone whines about stolen
CNN? FoxNews? NYTimes? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Plagiarism" (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if someone reads about an idea, digests it, and is able to communicate the idea BETTER, is that plagiarism?
What is it with you slashdotters? You seem to have a grade school understanding of ideas and plagiarism. Have you ever seen DIFFERENT WORDINGS of the same idea? Have you ever seen DIFFERENT IDEAS worded similarly? Have you ever taken an undergraduate philosophy class? Until you can tell those situations apart and come up with a nuanced opinion, please learn not to label such things as plagiarism. It's akin to calling a flirt a rapist, or a lab mouse a rat.
I don't plagiarize... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bloggers (Score:2, Insightful)
So, you are saying the same rules that apply to information dissemination in the rest of society apply in this part of society as well?
shocking, just shocking. I thought everything having to do with computers was new and different and could only be explained by highly trained futurists.
</sarcasm>
wow, i really need some coffee this morning, that was totally uncalled for!
Re:Here's the article text (Score:3, Insightful)
The link-aggregating blogs, like Metafilter, Instapundit, Little Green Footballs,
There's already a way to track the propagation of an idea across multiple blogs, developed by MovableType [movabletype.org] called TrackBack [movabletype.org].
TrackBack-enabled blogging systems will generate a TrackBack URL. When a blogger links to/writes about a story on another blog, they can "pingback" the TrackBack URL of the "parent" blog entry. These pingbacks are aggregated by the originator and can allow visitors to see who's linking to the post they're reading and what those linkers are saying.
Of course, all of this depends on the secondary linkers being dedicated TrackBackers...
If you have a blog, I'd recommend looking into TrackBack.
Re:Steal? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is how ideas spread... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then with Radio and the birth of modern mass media, people would listen to ideas, and the ideas that were accpted were talked about and sometime these ideas affected people in interesting ways. [google.com]
Same thing with TV. But by the time TV came along, the ideas weren't ideas per say, they were gossippy comments on Dick van Dyke's wife (50's) to Janet's boob (2004).
Now with the internet, some people are propagating ideas again. (Some are not.) But as always, the ideas are coming from other sources and the ideas that are being accepted are being passed on.
Anecdote: On a quiz with my class, I asked to briefly explain communism, capitalism, and so forth...A student answered this:
Communism: All your profits are belong to us
Great answer that assimulated ideas from the net and spread them around.
What am I getting at? It ok that others borrow/steal/copy ideas. Ideas are meant to be shared and debated. To own an idea and say, "Mine" is like trying to own the air you breathe. You can;t stop it from spreading.
(breaks over...no time to proofread... sorry)
Things misconstrued as Plagiarism (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't we after all human? Two people can't have the same idea? I will admit that i sometime get ideas from bloggers, but if this was considered stealing or plagiarism then ALL news outlets are plagiarists. BLOGs should be looked at as personal news with personal views.
My best example was this /. journal entry [slashdot.org]. I got the idea from a church sermon. AFTER I WROTE IT, I did some more research on the topic and found out some others had similar thoughts. I, of course, think I "worded" it better! ;)
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:3, Insightful)
totally flawed to me (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't evaluate any potential value of the link (i.e. how to remove worms would be more valuable and more likely to be repeatedly link than, say, here's the laptop I just bought. Or a funny picture that also has own intrinistic value). Plus all this information is on the internet...freely dessiminated and available for the most part. It's a bit like claiming because every newspaper is covering a story, all newspapers must be copying the first story run.
Re:No way! (Score:4, Insightful)
</gripe>
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course SOME actual innovation occurs but its very very minor.
Well duuuuh. (Score:5, Insightful)
The service they provide is going through hundreds of bad links to find the interesting ones to recommend to their readers. I think this report is simply stating the obvious.
Also, if this is a big deal, why doesn't Slashdot include a "via" field for submissions to give credit to where the poster found the link? Personally, I always give credit for links when the site I found the link from supports TrackBack, any other times it's a crapshoot.
Oh please (Score:2, Insightful)
When Bloggers to it it's called stealing
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit (Score:5, Insightful)
And as far as your comment on the simplicity of the scripting required, that's just snobbery. I'll bet your design and scripting skills are miles further ahead than those of most bloggers, but so what? How is that relevant?
There is vapidity everywhere these days from TV, to movies, to music, even to the bloody news! Something as simple and community oriented as a blog does not deserve to be passed off as insignificant and vapid. The content is not necessarily as important as the medium. Blogs are part of our modern oral tradition, and from a sociological standpoint they're extremely relevant and important media.
er, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
It may be that the popular bloggers have ease-of-use on their side (they aggregate the information in a better format).
It may be that they are linked to by other popular bloggers, and get referrals/popularity/hits that way... popularity begeting popularity.
Also, on an unrelated note, intelligence doesn't necessarily imply misanthropy... intelligent people are not only liked by other intelligent people. Being a nice, likeable guy doesn't necessarily imply intelligence or lack thereof. On the other hand, if you combine intelligence and an obnoxious/ostentatious attitude, you'll get resentment for sure, and not just from idiots.
spreading memes = plagiarism (Score:3, Insightful)
Should scientists start suing each other for building research on earlier published papers and referencing them in their new publications?
Do these "researchers" really think news outlets and "original" bloggers put out information hoping no one else will discuss it in print or online? Am I stealing their research by discussing it here?
Re:Generally stealing ideas is good for growth (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting, but missing half the point (Score:3, Insightful)
This article isn't saying that bloggers outright copy... just that often, a common topic will explode among many bloggers. Sometimes when I write about something in my LiveJournal that I've seen elsewhere, I've seen it in so many blogs that proper attribution would be difficult at best...
Most bloggers don't really give a shit if their ideas for topics are used elsewhere... if their words are used without permission/attribution, then there is an issue, but the ideas and subjects flow freely for a reason... we WANT them to.
"Stealing" an Idea?! (Score:5, Insightful)
This just goes to show how fucked up we've become.
If I, blogger, quote someone else, even unattributed, or talk about someone else's idea, that's "theft?" Gimme a break. You don't automatically own ideas just because you write them down.
You can't really "own" an idea anyway -- there's no US constitutional provision for that, just an allowance for a limited monopoly to encourage more creation.
Blogs are, by definition, a conversation. Calling that conversation "theft" is ridiculous to an extremem. What, if I'm talking to someone IRL, should I force them to "license" my ideas before continuing?
"Sorry, before we can continue, please sign here and pay this fee. Then we can keep talking about my ideas about how to set up a new centralized login server."
Re:I have some ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that copying is bad is a recent one. Prior to the industrial revolution the highest form of the craftsman's art was often considered to be the ability to create perfect copies of other people's work. Innovation is a relatively new idea. If you go to recently industrialized countries the bias for originality is often absent.
Several people have the same idea all the time. Whit Diffie was not the first to think up public key cryptography, but nobody claims he copied it off Cocks at GCHQ. I often take apart other people's schemes and find they have had ideas that are similar to my own.
Invention is not just originality, it is also reuse of existing ideas, improving where necessary and useful. In many case it is the circumstances that lead to the result.
Take a look at the Cagle cartoons on Slate. They have all the editorial cartoons from 40 odd papers across the country. The number of times that the same cartoon idea appears again and again is uncanny. These people might be copying to a small extent, but it simply isn't possible for them to all come out with the same idea in such a short time.
I am probably not the only person who thinks that the latest '24x7' hunt for Bin Laden is something we should have been doing for the past two years. If you read the blogs you will find page after page of people outraged that the start of the hunt for Bin Laden seems to have been timed to coincide with the first Bush election ads. I doubt many of them have seen my slashdot .sig. Clearly much of this is independent thought.
Blogs are an entertainment and a political movement. They are not academic journals or treatises. Not that there is much of importance or originality in the academic litterature. Sure people lift ideas but thats why most people are putting them out there.
For years people have been asking if I am angry that Microsoft has copied many of my ideas. Oddly enough nobody has ever asked me if I minded other people copying my ideas (and passing them off as their own which Microsoft has never done), but that is another story. The fact is that I want people to use my ideas, they are useless unless they are put into action. Microsoft use a lot of my ideas because I spend a lot of time persuading them to use them. My principal complaint about Netscape is that they just shut themselves off from the Web community, they got the idea that they were the only people who had the good ideas.
Re:Aggregators (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Stealing" an Idea?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideas are the Genesis of all the elements of our human made society. How do you allow people to get paid for creating an idea? If I generate millions of wonderful ideas and never get credit, what incentive is there for me to continue doing so.
All our IP laws are about trying to find a way to give a person credit for an idea. You can own an idea in the sense that you birthed it. Once the idea is in another person's mind, do they own it as much as you did? They can be said to own the idea but they did not birth it. They "stood on your shoulders" to get the idea.
Do you deserve credit? yes. Can you get compensation for it? maybe. Is it fair that the person who "birthed" VisiCalc doesn't get any royalties for "Excel" even though the Genesis for the idea of an Electronic Spreadsheet was birthed in his mind? No.
So life's not fair and ideas do get "stolen" but that's the nature of an idea.
iRank doesn't tell you much... (Score:3, Insightful)
But what I really wanted to say was that there is no method to verify if the same person posted the blog idea to several different sites. It's quite common that someone would post an idea on their personal Blog, and subsequently submit it to SlashDot and Yahoo, etc.
I'm trying to say that it's not necessarily plagurism, but it certainly opens up new discussion on some long standing questions about information ownership. Oh, wait, that means my whole post was a re-used idea. Hmph. So much for innovation..Oh, and the obligatory... In related news, it was found that some people post the content of entire articles that were pointed to by the story itself, sometimes attributed, sometimes not.
Why is this surprising? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dan East
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:1, Insightful)
'outright copying' is pure, blatant bullshit. 'outright copying' implies that source code is being 'stolen' and used vertabrim from non-oss projects, which isn't even possible.
it's not even possible because
1) the source isn't available to rip off
2) the source would be there, visible, waiting for a lawsuit to happen
remember, copyright is the only reason copyleft works, and while a lot of copyleft supporters may lean away from the concept of 'ip', we still understand that we are nothing without copyright law. without copyright law, someone could take oss code, rip it off and put it into a closed source app.
also, if you honestly believe that only the open source world 'copies' ideas from other companies and that only the closed source world 'innovates' then i encourage you to get fucking informed.
think about the gaming industry, where a few genres are rehashed again and again.
think about the groupware industry, where dozens of companies offer solutions to unify your email/calendar/contacts/inventory/etc.
think about the os industry. think PARC, think X11, think MacOS, think windows, think KDE/Gnome..
i'm pretty sure you're a troll. ihbt, etc. but it's fun to rant in the morning at work.
It ain't just the blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
Or look at academic journals, and notice that most of the articles just recycle accepted variants on ideas. The exception is professors from just a few top schools - Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, MIT - who have enough faith in their individual minds to actually follow ideas into new terrain. This is similar to why the NY Times reporters sometimes lead, too: their institution lends them the status to assume their instincts are good, while most of us are too insecure to be other than sheep.
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit (Score:3, Insightful)
I, for one, use my blog not only for something to do that keeps me from playing video games, but it's a simple and easy method to keep my family and friends up to date on the inane and silly things going on in my household.
The primary reason I write on my blog is to do just that...write. It helps me to polish what little skill I may have, and keep the 'writing juices' flowing. I, like many unpublished writers (well, I had some poetry published in college, but that and $1.50 will get you a coffee at Starbuck's), still keep hope alive in the back of my mind that someday I will actually get a story or a novel published. I write my blog as a way of keeping my typing skills up, without worrying about excessive editing or typos. Occasionally, I'll actually have something of (what I consider) import to say, and I'll say it on my blog.
But guess what? Usually those are things that are fairly common to the human condition. As an example, what happens if I happen to be watching CNN and see a completely obvious falsehood presented as fact. I can go to their story on line, read it, and judge whether it was a mistake or not. If the error exists online, I can link to it in my blog, and post my correction. But, and this is the important part, I am VERY likely not the only person to do so. I am also VERY likely not to be the only person with a particular viewpoint, especially in the blogging community. People with viewpoints like to express them. It's not even remotely odd that many people, sharing the same viewpoint, would link to the same items on their blogs.
The word "scientific" is overused (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no control group, the methods and techniques of interrogation have not been made public so they can be scrutinized and these results have not yet been independently verified. Therefore, this conclusion was NOT reached by applying the scientific method.
Sincerely,
Mr. Pedantic (TM)
[grin]
It's like jazz, baby. Or monkeys. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then it'll percolate in that cute little head of yours, and you'll have your own version. Just like witnesses to a crime and snowflakes, baby.
The worst bloggers are going to stand out because they're just like monkeys - they're the trend followers. They like the idea of a blog, but never had to think an original thought in their life. So they do what the other blogs are doing, even when they don't understand the reason. Just like monkeys running around in a cage, see?
Now the best monkeys see the walls and know that they're in a cage, so they figure, 'I'm outta sight and outta mind if I don't get out of here', and they make the leap to bigger and better things, ya dig?
Getting back to the band, the true cream of the crop ain't going to be liftin' the gold stars from their neighbors paper - they're not gonna care what YOU think. They gave at the office, and they're past that.
They got a whole different filter in their head; what goes in must come out, but in ways the regular joe just won't understand. Joe's just gonna take that train and see where it goes.
The best conductors are going to take you for a spin, make the ride entertaining, and leave you right back where you came from with a pocket of souvenirs.
At least, that's how I see it.
Re:"Plagiarism" (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if someone reads about an idea, digests it, and is able to communicate the idea BETTER, is that plagiarism?
Actually, yes. Yes it is.
1. To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own.
2. To appropriate for use as one's own passages or ideas from (another).
v. intr.
To put forth as original to oneself the ideas or words of another.
I'm sorry, but the idea that plagiarizing refers only to use of copy and paste is actually the understanding that comes from grade school. Believe me, I do understand the situation and have a nuanced opinion (I've been deeply involved with an academic integrity board at a research university for several years). There are different degrees of plagiarism, some blatantly wrong and some blurring the line of acceptibility, but they are all plagiarism.
I've written several conference papers, and am finishing a master's thesis now. In the process of my research, I've read a number of papers, I've digested them, and I'm now expanding on them in new ways. I don't have any direct quotes, but I do have many, many references in my papers. Why? Because many of the ideas are not mine. So what if I digested them; I didn't create them independently. Not referencing the works that gave me my understanding, but instead passing it off as having sprung full-form from my head, would indeed be plagiarism.
Just because an idea has been considered by the person who re-tells it doesn't mean that the place that gave them the idea doesn't deserve credit. Granted, an academic environment is much stricter about these things... but that's a difference in tolerance of plagiarism, not of the definition of what plagiarism fundamentally is.
Memes unscientific (Score:4, Insightful)
The HP study is a purportedly scientific study of memes. That is where they erred.
Memes are unscientific. They have no validity in social science.
Don't cite some asshat scientific journal that talks about memes to me. The key to science is whether it can be falsified. (Note the username.)
As Karl Popper would say, there is nothing about the notion of a meme that can be falsified. Hence, it is not a scientific notion.
It's easy to see why computer scientists can be taken in by them. You see the world as if it were a computer. In fact, it is more complicated.
Go ahead, though, and play around. Waste your time with memes.
A plague on all the meme foolishness.
Plagiarism? (Score:2, Insightful)
How many jokes that you tell on a daily basis are ones you made up yourself?
It's just "Telephone" in a digital context (Score:2, Insightful)
Dick reads Jane's post, then blogs his take on it.
Sally reads Dick's blog, and blogs her twist.
Tom catches Sally's blog, and then spins his blog.
Jane notices Tom's blog and says, "Gee this looks familiar, sort of..."
Ideas in the public domain... (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole concept is kind of ridiculous. Everyone steals everyone elses ideas. It reminds me of the music world where everyone steals everyone elses work. The plagarism part comes when the music is similar enough to be considered the same work. There's also a minimum number of notes you have to have for a work to be copyrightable. What you're talking about is gross plagarism and perhaps stealing entire concepts. It's also something that mostly applies to acadamia where people care about that sort of thing. The whole argument just begs the question how original is anyones work? Ideas don't come out of a vacuum, they come from other ideas.
Re:Few Original Ideas (Score:2, Insightful)
Memes unscientific-Gradiant Morality. (Score:1, Insightful)
The very definition of modern day Morality.
Ethics however disagree's with you.
Try this: You have written a paper on the propagation of sound waves in 10W30 oil.
Someone copies it not only without attribution, but claims it as his own.
Is this plagiarism? By your definition, if the majority say it isn't, then you're screwed with no recourse. Now what does that do to your "incentive" to produce more papers on the propagation of sound waves in 10W30 oil.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.
Re:funny and insightful! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:2, Insightful)
CLIs are not a new thing, you know... kids today...
cheers
Slashdot IS A BLOG (Score:1, Insightful)
"I learned it from watching you!" (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is different from the traditional media HOW???
Not "stealing", nothing physical. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Memes unscientific (Score:3, Insightful)
You are misusing the concept of falsification here, and Karl Popper would probably call you on this just the same as I: falsification applies to assertions or hypotheses.
But notion of a "meme" is an entity: a labled observable, so it is not even eligible for the falsification test. You can't falsify the concept of mass either...but you can falsify an assertion that involves mass, such as "eating too much can result in increasing the mass of your body".
Now, if you wish to discuss whether or not a specific claim regarding memes is falsifiable, that's possible. Take the claim that "memes cannot be propagated without using language as a vector". There's an assertion about memes that is, indeed, falsifiable: if one observes meme transfer based upon silent observation and imitation, then you will have falsified that assertion.
You are right that "memes" are unscientific. Just as "mass" is unscientific. Science is a complicated filter that we apply to assertions. There's nothing inherently scientific about any of the entities that we study, whether they be memes or mass.
Re:Yes, horrible plagiarism! (Score:3, Insightful)
Shakespeare's genius was that he had a "music" all his own. He could craft a sentence with devastating effect. He was a wordsmith. This was what saved him from being a crappy playwright. Other people can say the same things, but their music is not the same.
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:2, Insightful)
The OSS community simply gives it away, while MS and Apple actually profit financially from the whole thing.
Wow.