November 28, 2007
GOP Congressional Candidate Plagiarizing Bloggers
Looks like former (and likely future) Minnesota GOP Congressional candidate Michael Barrett has been plagiarizing right-of-center bloggers for his own Seventh Son blog.
Double Plus Undead noticed he was stealing some of his stuff and calls him on it here.
I don't want to defend the indefensible, but I'm want to just say a few words to bloggers. I've noticed a lot of my blog posts plagiarized over the years. The few times I've called people on it I realized that they didn't really know that what they were doing was outside the bounds of blog etiquette. They thought it was okay to cut and paste an entire post, as long as they linked me.
When I've confronted bloggers guilty of this they universally apologize, saying they just didn't know you weren't supposed to do that. Newsflash: it's not.
Go ahead and cut and paste part of a post. The idea, though, is that if someone wants to read the post, they'll go to the original source to see it. My words, my hits.
In addition to being discourteous, it's against copyright law!
Now, I've looked at the posts in question by Seventh Son, and it seems that this douche didn't even do that. He didn't even link the people he plagiarized from! Which makes what he did even worse.
PS: Another related problem is with bloggers cutting and pasting entire news stories. Major problem. I'm not likely to sue you for plagiarizing me, but the AP has more than a few lawyers well versed in copyright law.
