Plagiarism or Miscommunication

When you watch syndicated columnists and talking heads, most notably those on the political right, you can see how quickly a particular theme or argument can be distributed - how the same words suddenly appear in the columns or are heard from the mouths of dozens of partisan opinion leaders. While sometimes a catchy turn of phrase will catch on quickly, in many cases it's more than fair to assume that they've received those talking points from a common source. More so when the words fit with a new political attack, or are part of a Frank Lutz-type effort to skew the language to be more favorable to a Republican cause.

Also, it's not particularly unusual to see a major newspaper carry an opinion column by a prominent person who otherwise has not demonstrated either the necessary interest or capacity to pen a coherent opinion column. Sometimes a co-author is credited, but sometimes it's pretty clear that the column was written by somebody else. That could be a staff member, but let's not forget that advocacy groups often write opinion pieces that they shop around to politicians - "Stick your name on this, and we can get it into the Post or the Times."

At the next level, we have the payola-type scandals that periodically hit the news, when it is revealed that a columnist is taking money to advance a particular cause or idea. Columnists caught with their hands in the cookie jar typically protest, "I took the money, but I wrote exactly what I would have written had I not been paid." But... do you believe it? Obviously the people paying them do not.

So when I hear that a columnist like Juan Williams has plagiarized, yes, the theory of double plagiarism could be true. It could be that Juan Williams believed that he was only plagiarizing his assistant, and that using his assistant's words without attribution was fair game because "everybody does it". But it could also be that the intern was given an instruction that he simply misunderstood. Something along the lines of,

Get me some content from an immigration organization that I can use to pump up my argument.

Under this theory, the intern may have believed he was tasked with researching the findings of organizations that had written reports on the subject, and then communicate that information back to Williams. But Williams may have expected that the intern would contact somebody within an organization whose beliefs were aligned with the argument he hoped to "pump up", not to get their published findings, but to get a pre-written passage or column that it was understood would be plugged into his column with few or no changes.

Many years I heard an interesting story from the employee of a manufacturing consortium. She was tasked with putting together the newsletter, and they were coming up on a deadline to send it to the printer. Her boss had instructed her that one of the articles needed to be more compelling, and told her to contact a specific U.S. Senator's office to get a quote supporting the article's thesis. She tried to get a quote, but was unable to get through. "Don't worry about it," she was told, "Run the quote and we'll get him to clear it after-the-fact."

When you have sufficient prominence and sufficient connection, the rules don't apply to you in the same way that they perhaps did during your earlier career. It's not really a surprise that some columnists think it's okay to take a payoff to write opinion pieces that they rationalize, "I would have written anyway," that they think it's okay to plagiarize their interns without attribution, that they borrow words, phrases, and even entire columns from advocacy groups who are trying to push the same message. What harm is there in letting somebody else do the heavy lifting for you, if you're already essentially on the same page, right?

The sad part, it seems to me, is that these games are played on a massive scale, the efforts to rein them in seem half-hearted, and the consequences for getting caught usually amount to nothing.

Lawyers, Stop Stealing Content!

Google recently implemented an update to its search engine algorithm. The update, commonly known as "Farmer" but also referred to as "Panda", devalues sites and pages that the revised algorithm deems to have little to no unique content. The search engine community refers to the sites the algorithm was intended to affect as "content farms", hence "Farmer": an algorithm update directed at "farms".

I have maintained legal websites for many years, most notably the website ExpertLaw.com. I compiled a significant collection of articles for that website. I wrote the majority of the articles myself, and for the most part they offer solid content. (Some would benefit from being revised, expanded or updated; but as they say, there are only so many hours in the day.)

There are two issues you will confront if you publish materials on the Internet:

• First, you will encounter people who don't understand that copyright law applies to the Internet, and believe that anything online is theirs for the taking.

• Second, you will encounter many webmasters who don't care about who owns or creates content - the web is theirs for the stealing.

Historically, at least in relation to my site, Google has done a reasonable job of distinguishing the original article from plagiarized copies and slightly modified versions that have been posted around the web. With the "Farmer" update, that is no longer the case. Some of my original articles will no longer appear in the search results unless you go to the last page of the search results and click to "repeat the search with the omitted results included." Afterward they may appear on the first page of search results, but thanks to the extent of plagiarism Google is no longer treating my site as the original publisher. Also, even when my site appears in the regular results, at times it will be outranked by (that is, appear in the list of results below) a page that reproduces my original content.

Here's the kicker: A lot of those websites belong to lawyers and law firms.

And when you look at the lawyer websites that contain plagiarized content, it's rare that it's just the one article. Often they will present, without attribution, may articles or excerpts of articles from my site, other sites, or a combination of sites.

Usually when this happens it's because the law firm hired a web designer who believes that the rest of the Internet is theirs to take or steal. Sometimes the law firm will even pay the designer for hours of time allegedly spent creating the content (when in fact the designer spent only a few minutes stealing it.

But lawyers have no excuses when it comes to respecting copyright laws. And as lawyers know, they're responsible for the acts of their agents (leaving aside for the moment that sometiemes the theft is by the lawyer, not an agent.) Sometimes, knowing full well that they had nothing to do with the creating of the stolen content, lawyers will actually attach their own bylines to the articles. How is it ethical to claim to have authored something that was cribbed from the Internet by somebody else (or... by you)?

So lawyers should watch out.

1. If your content largely consists of content stolen from other sites, the "Farmer" update may cause your site to plummet in Google's search results;

2. If you or your web designer have stolen content from other sites, and worse if you purport to have authored that content, you are likely running afoul of your state's rules of professional responsibility.

3. There are a bunch of honest webmasters who are losing web traffic and money due to the conduct of people like you, and we're mad as H-E-Double Chopsticks. Some of us will file DMCA requests with search engines or your web host to try to have your plagiarized content removed. Some of us have registered copyrights for our content and can seek statutory damages. Some of us are lawyers.

If you did not personally author your website's content it's time to review it. Enter pages from your site into Copyscape and see if the same content appears on other websites. Copy portions of sentences from your pages and paste them into Google (using quotation marks) - for example, if you have a passage on your website,

This tool will guide you through the process of reporting content that you believe warrants removal from Google's services based on applicable laws. Completing this form will help ensure that we have all of the information necessary to investigate your specific inquiry and resolve it as quickly as possible.

You could copy a relatively unique excerpt such as "based on applicable laws. Completing this form will help ensure" and run a Google search to see where else it appears.

If your site includes plagiarized content, take it down. Immediately. Or, better, yesterday. You have no excuse.

Addendum: The same goes for when you're posting articles or answers to questions on sites like Avvo. Don't steal text from other people's articles and pass it off as your own analysis. That's dishonest and unethical - if you have to steal somebody else's words to make yourself appear proficient, how can you argue but that your intent is anything but to mislead potential clients who read the article about your knowledge and experience?

The Madison County Freakin' Plagiarists

You may or may not have heard of the "Madison County Record", which was created by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce "as a weapon in its multimillion-dollar campaign against lawyers who file" questionable lawsuits:

Neither Anderson nor Timpone see any need for the paper to disclose in its pages that the chamber is an owner. Timpone said the chamber doesn't dictate the paper's news content and he defends the stories he runs as genuine news. He said he chose not to divulge the Record's connection to the chamber in print because "I was afraid we'd be prejudged. I thought, 'Let people judge us by our actions.'"

Well, gee... You would think that with a $million dollar budget, they could have managed to draft a few original paragraphs for this page, rather than plagiarizing Jones Act material from my website.

Remember - they want us to judge them by their actions....

[Update: They responded quite promptly to an email, and have added a link to my site consistent with what I asked them to do if they wished to continue to use the material. Given that the principals of the organization probably had no idea that somebody had been "borrowing" passages from around the Internet on their behalf, I will give them credit for quickly taking both responsibility and remedial action.]

That DMCA Thing....

Some time ago, I tracked down a large number of sites which were plagiarizing my web content, and asked that they stop. Three replied:

• "An intern did it; she no longer works here.";


• "I paid my web designer for original work; I'll have his head for this!"; and


• "It's good content. Can I keep using it?"

Yesterday I tracked down more instances of plagiarism. Responses have already come from most people contacted, with quick removal of plagiarized material. The difference, in my opinion, is that the major search engines are now responding very quickly to DMCA notices.