Paul McDougall points out in An InformationWeek blog on Thursday that a data security letter published on Seattle.gov, the web site for the city of Seattle, published content that is word for word identical to other new releases. One of these is an article published by InformationWeek writer Kelley Jackson Higgins. Googling the first sentence of the article produced a couple of other sites with identical sentences, though I could not actually find the article when I went to those pages.
It is particularly odious when a government entity (local or otherwise) indulges in behavior that even gives the appearance of plagiarism, for it undermines values that it should help promote, and justifies unethical practices when it should be serving as the gatekeeper. That said, and granted it is a fine distinction, but the publication of previously written content on a web site is not, by itself, plagiarism. That is because it does not attribute the content to someone who did not originate it. In many cases, such as the one McDougall points to (at least originally), the site simply fails to attribute the content at all. We can argue about whether it is implied, by virtue of publication, that the content is original. That is a difficult case to make out, because (1) on many web sites, most of the content is not attributed to anyone; (2) "publication" is a term of art, here, because there is normally no peer review and often very little in the way of oversight, or even editing, of the content; (3) the intent to deceive, which is a normal component of most acts of plagiarism, does not clearly exist; and (4) the expectation of profit, recognition, or other benefits that usually motivates plagiarism is not clearly present. So I don't know if McDougall's epithet "blatantly plagiarized" really fits the situation. We should be a little circumspect before lumping cases of anonymous web posts together with those of the student who hands in a plagiarized paper with his name on it as fulfillment of a course assignment, or the author whose name appears on a book or article in which content written by someone else appears without attribution.
The kind of practice McDougall points to is so prevalent on the Internet that picking out one instance almost misses the point. He opens his article by pointing to "news aggregators", sites which provide brief summaries, quotes and/or links to sites which originate content. There are an endless number of such sites, at least if you count them liberally; even such recognized sites as Slate and The Huffington Post could be made out to be part of the problem. Just how bad it is depends on how much unoriginal content is required before the use of it becomes objectionable. But regardless of the precise extent, the prevalence of these practices is sometimes taken as evidence that they pose no problem. We may have a tendency to feel that anything that is very widely done is not worth objecting to. But that is more intellectual laziness than considered judgment. The problem goes way beyond the self-conscious aggregators, who depend in part on a broad interpretation of the concept of fair use. I've recently found the same health care information - exact same wording, as in the examples cited by McDougall - posted on not two, but maybe half a dozen different sites. In some cases, it is the reverse of the present situation: a government institution (such as the National Institute of Health) appears to have created content to which several for-profit web sites have helped themselves. On another occasion I found the entire text of Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit" published on a web site in Georgia (U.S.) that claims to be a news site; although it was attributed to Frankfurt and Princeton University Press, I strongly suspect it was used without permission, and could not conceivably fall under fair use principles.
The kind of practice McDougall points to is so prevalent on the Internet that picking out one instance almost misses the point. He opens his article by pointing to "news aggregators", sites which provide brief summaries, quotes and/or links to sites which originate content. There are an endless number of such sites, at least if you count them liberally; even such recognized sites as Slate and The Huffington Post could be made out to be part of the problem. Just how bad it is depends on how much unoriginal content is required before the use of it becomes objectionable. But regardless of the precise extent, the prevalence of these practices is sometimes taken as evidence that they pose no problem. We may have a tendency to feel that anything that is very widely done is not worth objecting to. But that is more intellectual laziness than considered judgment. The problem goes way beyond the self-conscious aggregators, who depend in part on a broad interpretation of the concept of fair use. I've recently found the same health care information - exact same wording, as in the examples cited by McDougall - posted on not two, but maybe half a dozen different sites. In some cases, it is the reverse of the present situation: a government institution (such as the National Institute of Health) appears to have created content to which several for-profit web sites have helped themselves. On another occasion I found the entire text of Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit" published on a web site in Georgia (U.S.) that claims to be a news site; although it was attributed to Frankfurt and Princeton University Press, I strongly suspect it was used without permission, and could not conceivably fall under fair use principles.
McDougall is right to be incensed. But the problem is much bigger than Seattle; bigger than news "aggregators"; even bigger than the crop of Internet-age college students who sometimes brag that they have gone through college without ever having had to write an original essay. You can change individual behavior by calling people on the carpet; but you can't change a culture by making examples of a few people. Look at the baseball doping scandal, in the news once again now - it is, in fact, far beyond a problem with a few high-profile players, beyond baseball, beyond the U.S. It came to be accepted that this is the way it is in sports, and if you want to be a sissy and not take steroids then you can watch your stats suffer and your salary go down. Similarly, if you want to try to create your own content - e.g., as I think I'm doing right now - you can just deal with it when you find you can't post as often or get as many hits as some "aggregator" who simply takes sound bites that other people have written and makes that look like a great service to humanity.
The whole notion of original content is undermined by the increasing probability that any given content has already been copied from somewhere else without attribution, making it easy to justify copying from the copier without attribution. And who is supposed to be responsible for investigating whether any particular sentence on a web site is original? Add to that the old adage that "information wants to be free" and you have all the makings of a general descent into postmodern culture where everything is recycled, origins make no difference, and creative incompetence is transformed into the virtue of making apposite choices of material to repeat.
All this is too heavy a burden to rest on the shoulders of some IT dude who ripped some data security articles and broadcasts and put them up as public notice on a non-profit web site. That person must have already soaked up so much of the free-flowing whiskey of repetition that s/he is drunk with possibilities as s/he surveys the limitless expanse of already published web content, and not without some justice counts it as a bonafide professional virtue to be able to sift through it all and post the most relevant items in little blue boxes on Seattle.Gov. The nature of this act is buried under so many layers of banality that some of the commentators on McDougall's blog even questioned why the whole thing was even worthy of a blog post! (What exactly does it take to be worthy of being a blog post these days? Some people actually take the "blog" idea seriously and post any old drivel on a daily basis just to chat in the public's ear.)
Others doubted the wisdom of the fact that in his final paragraph, McDougall has the chutzpah to mention that Microsoft, in the following context:
Not too long ago I had in my hands a resume from a consultant applying for a high level position managing a major IT project. One of the requirements for the job was the ability to write complex design and analysis documents. People were required to submit samples of their work. What I received from this consultant looked very professional; I was duly impressed. But just as a precaution, I grabbed a particularly well put sentence from his document and stuck it in my favorite search engine. Never guess what popped up... perhaps the latest Annual Report from the company where the consultant had just completed an assignment? This is why it is ever so appropriate that Harry Frankfurt's article should end up copied wholesale on some obscure web site, available free of charge to anyone who doesn't want to pay Amazon $9.95 for a hardcover reprint of On Bullshit ($7.96 for the Kindle edition, speaking of repetition - that would be, I think, the sixth licensed version of what is a philosophy article of ordinary length.) We are becoming a nation, no a world, of bullshitters, and the bullshit is hitting the fan. The proof of it is that when somebody like McDougall gets decently outraged at a shining example of the bullshit that is blowing in the wind, some people cannot even figure out what the hell his problem is. Here is the latest response to his blog post, by someone who identifies him/herself as "dorsai":
The whole notion of original content is undermined by the increasing probability that any given content has already been copied from somewhere else without attribution, making it easy to justify copying from the copier without attribution. And who is supposed to be responsible for investigating whether any particular sentence on a web site is original? Add to that the old adage that "information wants to be free" and you have all the makings of a general descent into postmodern culture where everything is recycled, origins make no difference, and creative incompetence is transformed into the virtue of making apposite choices of material to repeat.
All this is too heavy a burden to rest on the shoulders of some IT dude who ripped some data security articles and broadcasts and put them up as public notice on a non-profit web site. That person must have already soaked up so much of the free-flowing whiskey of repetition that s/he is drunk with possibilities as s/he surveys the limitless expanse of already published web content, and not without some justice counts it as a bonafide professional virtue to be able to sift through it all and post the most relevant items in little blue boxes on Seattle.Gov. The nature of this act is buried under so many layers of banality that some of the commentators on McDougall's blog even questioned why the whole thing was even worthy of a blog post! (What exactly does it take to be worthy of being a blog post these days? Some people actually take the "blog" idea seriously and post any old drivel on a daily basis just to chat in the public's ear.)
Others doubted the wisdom of the fact that in his final paragraph, McDougall has the chutzpah to mention that Microsoft, in the following context:
Microsoft has been at the forefront of efforts to combat piracy and intellectual property theft, but most of its efforts have focused on China and other developing markets. Note to Ballmer and Co.: Time to start looking in your own backyard!True, as the commentator, who posts as "NYSSA", pointed out, MS is in Redmond, not Seattle. As if Redmond had a reason to exist other than as a Seattle suburb until MS put it on the map. Surely it takes only a limited grasp of geography to see that it counts as MS's "own backyard". NYSSA then asks, " Is anything happening in Washington now to be tied to Microsoft?" True, MS is not responsible for every tree cut down by Weyerhauser. On the other hand, McDougall did not say that MS is responsible for the posting on Seattle.Gov. But NYSSA misses a much bigger point, though I'm not sure McDougall even wanted to go there (so I will). We are in the midst of a vast proliferation of digital content; a single sentence or an entire article can end up on dozens of web sites overnight, and the phenomenon extends even to official government sites. It is pervasive, and threatens us with a general cultural and moral decline, as the distinction between originality and regurgitation gets blurred, and the value of creative expression is lost. What is Microsoft's response to all this? What is Apple's response? What is Sony's response? Three little words, "We're losing money!" (Abbreviated "DRM".) The very people who brought us into the world where the virtual is the real and the real is the virtual have only one complaint: dirty no good rotten Chinese pirates and Russian hackers are threatening our profits and making it possible to not only copy literary content (about which we could not give two hoots, let Google worry about that one) but software, songs and movies! The nerve! Track them down, fine them (or their parents, if they happen to be under age) or force them to take jobs as data security consultants!
Not too long ago I had in my hands a resume from a consultant applying for a high level position managing a major IT project. One of the requirements for the job was the ability to write complex design and analysis documents. People were required to submit samples of their work. What I received from this consultant looked very professional; I was duly impressed. But just as a precaution, I grabbed a particularly well put sentence from his document and stuck it in my favorite search engine. Never guess what popped up... perhaps the latest Annual Report from the company where the consultant had just completed an assignment? This is why it is ever so appropriate that Harry Frankfurt's article should end up copied wholesale on some obscure web site, available free of charge to anyone who doesn't want to pay Amazon $9.95 for a hardcover reprint of On Bullshit ($7.96 for the Kindle edition, speaking of repetition - that would be, I think, the sixth licensed version of what is a philosophy article of ordinary length.) We are becoming a nation, no a world, of bullshitters, and the bullshit is hitting the fan. The proof of it is that when somebody like McDougall gets decently outraged at a shining example of the bullshit that is blowing in the wind, some people cannot even figure out what the hell his problem is. Here is the latest response to his blog post, by someone who identifies him/herself as "dorsai":
I'm not saying that ignoring copyright is OK, but this might have been a legitimate oversight by an overworked city worker, that appears to be fair use (at least it is now) based on the attribution links on the site.Okay, you're not sure, allow me to jump in. Go click on the link again, my friend, and you'll see an amazing thing: in the aftermath of McDougall's article, the aforementioned overworked city worker (I count myself as one of those, BTW - different city, though) has found the time to amend the article with attributions for each and every one of the security alerts he posted on the site! Now there's a reason to write a blog, by golly! Something that was a little off got corrected, the original writers received credit, the Seattle IT guy undoubtedly feels better about the whole thing, and the world is in general a better place! You know, if I could claim such accomplishments for most of my dozens of blog posts (not all on this blog) I think I would just throw a big party and invite everyone at Seattle.Gov and CMP too. Fortunately for my budget, I can't make such claims. But let's not get so jaded that we just look the other way or make excuses every time someone points out a mass instance of unattributed copying. The most encouraging thing about the whole incident is that the Seattle IT guy took the issue more seriously than his would-be defenders, and did something about it. Which suggests once again that if there is hope for a creative rebirth of humanity, it will probably come out of Seattle. Or at least the soundtrack will.
Not quite sure why this warranted a blog post.
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