A new plagiarism story is afoot on the web seeing light in many places.
Author Chris Anderson writes about the web, and web marketing. He is one who you expect to be savvy about things like social networking, open source, creative commons, and all that other Web 2.0 stuff that’s all the hot shite on teh interwebz. He knows the dynamics of the online mob like few other dead tree writers. . .
So you’d think he’d see this coming, wouldn’t you? You’d think if massive lifts of uncredited quotes from Wikipedia ended up in his book, he might realize that, well, there’d be a reaction. I mean, target audience anyone? Even if we’re as kind as his publisher and accept the explanation that it was all just a snafu: “All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…”
And somehow I don’t quite buy the explanation, especially given that the plagiaristic passages aren’t just a reprise of fact in the author’s words, but word-for-word cribbing of Wikipedia including transcription errors. Even if you had footnotes in place, that would be ethically problematic unless it was all set off as a quote.
Here’s a kicker, though: (From VQR Online)
Though reproducing words or original ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing traditional copyrighted text. Under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Anderson would be required to credit all contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
IMO, the Wikipedia usage goes a bit beyond fair use, so he’s probably violating the license even with footnotes. Of course the ready-made remedy is to release the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I wonder if that’s going to happen?