Need your opinion ... Plagiarism or not?

There are a few sites similar to this one that seem to plagiarize at will. The problem is, when most places like this have such tiny staffs, if they have any staff (other than them) at all, there is usually no recourse.

I know of instances at a couple Rivals sites where there were instances where plagiarism was completely obvious. One instance, another writer at the site let the owner know about what another guy there had done. The owner said he would look into it and never mentioned it again and after the season, fired the guy who told him about the instance and said he was a "troublemaker", and actually tried to prevent the guy from finding another job. The plagiarist still works there.

 

Ouch!

 

What recourse do you really have? You can make all the demands you want, but why should they capitulate?

 

Not enough in my opinion. An apology on their Web site, admitting the mistake, is standard.

SDS readers need to know somebody tried to or, whoopsie, accidentally stole your content and made it their own. Then SDS readers can decide for themselves whether to continue reading the content.

It's not about the writer, it's about the act.

 

The version I read, he credited quotes to the paper, but not the grafs.
So he gave them credit for some, but definitely not all.

 

That's a slippery slope.

If you have three quotes from Bill Belichick from the Boston Globe, do you put "Belichick told the Boston Globe" on all three quotes? Or just on the first one.

I was in a similar situation once and I put credit, using slightly different wording on all three quotes and the second and third credits were taken out by the desk, saying it read strange, which it did, and that our policy was one credit was enough and that on the second and third quote it was implied that it was also from the aforementioned paper.

Some places that's policy, some places that's plagiarism.

 

I do think they should at least go back and credit the work on their website. The editor can tell you the writer was reprimanded, but how?
Unfortunately even for traditional newspaper vs. newspaper plagiarism these days, a lot of times the publisher doesn't do much because the best recourse is a legal suit, and our industry leaders don't want to waste money to go after anyone.

That being said, there are enough of us on these boards with enough Twitter followers that we can start calling these guys out. Unfortunately a lot of times by doing so, as pointed out, it gets these sites hits, and that essentially is what they want. But still, I think these boards, and an extended Twitter network could be a good plan of action in the future.

 

You and I talked about this very topic recently on a thread (or in PMs maybe) about this very topic. I believe I was talking about a piece I had been working on (since published) that required a lot of library research. I ran up against exactly what you're wonder a lot in the course of it - it was a 70-inch piece with no original reporting.

I ended up attributing every quote. I didn't want to attribute every single sentence, for readability's sake. So what I personally decided to do was basically credit within a bloc of information, somewhere, where the information was coming from, and hope that it was clear that it was all essentially coming from the same source. It was an interesting exercise, and the editors apparently must have thought it OK. I had first turned it in with a mini-bibliography instead of attribution-as-you-go, but they wanted the latter. He said that that was as much to assist his editing process, though, for some reason, as it was an ethics/plagiarism thing.