LibraryTechtonics

My husband was reading a cheese blog for some odd reason, and read a story about an author who had her work quoted without citation by a newspaper and magazine), incidents that led to a Huffington Post story about the AP stating flat-out it does not credit blogs, following that logic that web content is “free research” (mostly because bloggers can’t afford to sue).

So he posed this question to me: “have you ever, to your knowledge, had your stuff ripped off? Have you heard of it happening to other bloggers? If so, by fellow Blogerians, or by Printies?”

While I can’t answer for other librarians, I can say that I’ve been cited by at least one person, Ellyssa Kroski, in an excellently interesting article on folksonomy. And I’ve been quoted and pointed to by a good many people. Steven Cohen asked my permission to use some documentation I wrote up for the PLA Blog in a book he’s working on. And I’ve had parts of a speech I wrote used again, which was totally cool by me. But to my knowledge, no one’s ever used my content in a fashion that breaks my Creative Commons license. Not that I know of, anyway.

The web is chock full of plagiarism, and most people don’t even know it. I’ve seen content lifted straight from the online version of Britannica on multiple web sites in the course of research. One of the skills of a librarian is to help people divine good versus evil on the internet, so to speak, but search engines are the best of all most convincing false prophets, open 24 hours a day, offering information quickly and easily, and without any pesky stereotypes to shy people away, so why worry if it’s really the good stuff or not?

It’s an interesting issue. Even the idea of plagiarism in the age of the internet has somehow become blurred. I was listening to an interesting piece on NPR’s All Things Considered last week about fan fiction (fiction written by avid fans based on popular existing “worlds” such as Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, and Friends, to name a few), which contrasted the debaucle over Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan’s book to the the cease and desist order on fanfic author Lori Jareo’s book (based in the Star Wars universe; several sci fi blogs panned the work) from Amazon.com because of copyright infringement.

Lev Grossman, reporter of the story (and fanfic writer himself), explains how fanfic exists almost exclusively as an avid fan-turned-author’s labor of love, shared for free on the internet, rather than a way to make a living. Most fanfic is allowed to thrive, because it feeds the fever of the fan base, and keeps them interested through creative interaction with the world and each other (whether or not the writing is very good). And, well, it seems to be OK since everyone wins. As long as they don’t try to make money off of it, which makes sense on a business and copyright level. A little leniency goes a long way, and the support of a fanbase can in many cases be held on par with brand equity and profit capital.

But snatching up someone’s well-researched work and summarily stating “we don’t cite the web, you put it up there, you suffer” should be infringement. If nothing else, it’s really wrong and unfair, but whether the laws really cover it, I don’t know for sure.

So tell me, have you had a problem with people stealing your content? I don’t really see the library world as a place where that happens, since the high-profile folks seem to be really, really high-profile and visible, so it seems hard to get away with. But really, not every librarian reads every librarian-authored book, and it also doesn’t mean non-librarians wouldn’t do it, I s’pose.

Thoughts?

Tags: technology