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CWF gets a drubbing in the Towpath Talk


Mick and Maggie

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I see that the 'Stillwater' column in Towpath talk (p110) has taken on the forum members - Some of who he has described as cheap-jack rabble rowsing. Not only that it seems that its been written at the behest of the IWA and a certain Mr Moran (who he?).

 

Have a read and a good laugh - hopefully he has cooled down to fiery by now.

 

 

Great syle .... obviously great at reasoned debating ..... if not a member here, he aught to be rolleyes.gif

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As the OP now I believe writes regularly for a site where that is commonplace, I assume he doesn't find that approach unacceptable, or is at least prepared to overlook how often they do this when getting his own pieces published. (Note: Definitely not accusing OP of plagiarism, but that site is of course rife with it).

 

Alan.

 

Its been quite a while since I spent any time plagiarism checking. But, back then the first question was, where does plagiarism finish and valuable research begin. The idea of plagiarism remains problematic with unclear definitions, unclear rules and the only recourse is copyright infringement.

 

Information comes in many different forms and each guise can change the context. If I publish a piece of work and it contains the text 'the cat sat on the mat'. Then anyone would be at liberty to quote the text. The origin of the text is lost in time and would certainly be out of copyright. So I do not have a unique ownership of the text. If I produced a long piece of text say a research paper and the text was original work. Backed up with original research. Then someone quoted from that text. First I would have to claim ownership of the work by copyright. I would need to append a disclaimer saying something like 'if a substantial amount of the work is quoted' than a link, acknowledgement, prior approval of the author or all should be provided. But the provision of copyright of work also allows for quotation. (sometimes referred to as copyleft)

 

But what is a fair quotation (copyleft) and what is substantial (copyright). Is the item in the public domain. Is it published more than once. Are there more than one version. An author may give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it and require that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same permission. Take wikileaks materials, often containing worldwide governments secrets and published in the public domain. It's not illegal to read, download, copy or share. In a strange twist of fate Narrow Boat World is a journalistic publication and therefore has a notion of 'freedom of the press' notwithstanding Levinson and other ineffectual judicial reviews of the press. It has certain protections that would not be available to anyone publishing on CWF. The fact that you see something published on-line elsewhere and on NBW does not in itself constitute plagiarism. The materials may have been supplied in the form of a specific timed or general press release.

 

As for myself, I contribute from time to time on NBW I see it as just another forum for expression and because I enjoy writing and researching. I do the same on CWF from time to time. As in this instance. The item came with a link back to the original source with my own comments appended. I did this because CWF is not a journal in the traditional sense. Journals and journalists often have personal agreements over publication matters.

 

Strangely, and unsurprisingly I never saw it as a vehicle to gather comments about NBW or plagiarism. I am sure that if the plagiarism was as widespread as you suggest many, copyright owners would be going down the path of infringement action. I saw it as only applicable to Towpath Talk and their columnist 'stillwater'. Now if you wanted to discuss ethical publication, freedom of the press, biased content, then I suggest we should start with a much easier target of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

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The plagiarism I was talking about in NarrowBoatWorld is the stuff where if you pluck a sentence from a "News" article, and put quotes around it, and feed it into Google, the whole article comes back more or less verbatim from where it has been pinched from.

 

The most blatant cases had something like "reports our Alan Tilbury" inserted into them, but otherwise they were a straight "lift" from somewhere else, (could even be BBC locall new pages, for example).

 

I have no idea to what extent this practice continues, because I now make a point of never going there to find out, but I do know when I was looking that it was rife.

 

I'm not talking about selective quoting - I'm talking about straight lifting of entire paragraphs, with little attempt made to disguise the practice.

 

That's not journalism - it is what we used to get in trouble for if caught doing it in our school work.

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That's not journalism - it is what we used to get in trouble for if caught doing it in our school work.

 

Alan.

 

The point I was making is that journalist habitually work to a different set of rules than you might find in academia. We are not talking about plagiarism contained in essays, course work, dissertations and thesis. No one is being judged or tested on their abilities. The pool of news is for sale or given away as press releases. There are businesses like Reuters where you can purchase a topic news feed. News is big business.

 

Taking a piece of text and pasting it in to Goggle has a few significant flaws. The items are not presented in publication date order. There is no ownership of the document established. You can pay and have your site at the top of the list. Documents that are very similar but disparate versions are all presented. Some times documents are aggregated together. Then who has copywrite. Google are also in this instance publishing the material and they apply no limitations upon usage.

 

A Web crawler, Web scutter or Web Spider is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, indexing new content to update their web content indexes. Because it has been trawled from the net and the web crawler or bot has been requested at some time. Bots and crawlers if not redirected away will catalogue and present the information that meets your search criteria. Then its in the public domain and free for everyone to use. To accuse any journal of plagiarising content based on placing text into a goggle search is flawed.

 

This text will be indexed in the next few days. Keywords within the text will be extracted and an estimate of relevance or 'ranking' will given to it. Subsequent web searches will be brought here to the text location. The viewer may then choose to visit Narrow Boat World to make their own opinion. They may contrast and compare the two sites and pass a personal judgement on each sites content.

 

There is a long list of things you will find acceptable in the Canal World Forum that you will not find in a journal like Narrow Boat World. To each their own.

  • Greenie 1
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I also think in the vast majority of cases, I am more than capable of working out whether NBW pinched a story from (say) a BBC web-site or vice versa, and I'm sure many other people are too!

 

First its plagiarism and now NBW is accused of theft.

 

Just remind me - as you have such an upright moral stance - I'm doing this in my best McCarthy voice - 'have you now or have you ever been published on NBW' What's next a show trial, complete with the cuckolds stool or burning at the stake. Seems to me to be something like a witch hunt.

 

Alan, I must thank you. I'm all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view .I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I bet it's hard to pronounce. I am now convinced that any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental. But, I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

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Alan, I must thank you. I'm all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view .I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I bet it's hard to pronounce. I am now convinced that any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental. But, I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

 

Wow - nice sarcasm!

 

Richard

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All they are doing is disseminating information to a wider audience. No plagiarism involved.

Rubbish!

 

Introducing words like "reports our Fred Smith" into the middle of somebody else's copy is pure plagiarism.

 

If they are only interested in spreading further what a BBC news site has said, they could do an article that says - "here is a link to an interesting article on the BBC web-site".

First its plagiarism and now NBW is accused of theft.

 

 

I think most people would see that "pinching a story" is a fair description of that kind of plagiarism.

 

Unauthorised use of somebody elses's images, (which they also do), I would probably describe as "pinching a photo", without necessarily expecting people to think they had been involved in breaking and entering.

Alan, I must thank you. I'm all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view .I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I bet it's hard to pronounce. I am now convinced that any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental. But, I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

 

Well thank you - we do try our best!

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Rubbish!

 

Introducing words like "reports our Fred Smith" into the middle of somebody else's copy is pure plagiarism.

 

If they are only interested in spreading further what a BBC news site has said, they could do an article that says - "here is a link to an interesting article on the BBC web-site".

 

Calm down, old chap. You'd think they'd published Hamlet, and were claiming authorship, from your description.

 

This is a storm in a tea-cup and you know it.

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Not all journalists think they are exempt from the normal rules of legality or ethical behavior, thank you, reports Canal World's own Alan Fincher.

I would never produce or sell or publish work that was not my own.

I think everyone is clear that press releases, aggregate agencies and sites like Reuters where you can purchase a feed are rather different to a website or person taking non public licensed work by another author and reproducing it as their own or without permission. NBW are famous for that; they've done it to me personally.

There is a difference between posting a freely offered press release, and taking someone else's copyright words or article and reproducing them verbatim as if the copier was the writer!

 

Copyright of anything published online is just the same as for the printed word; it is the property of the original author or whoever they sell series rights to.

If I write something and do not assign public rights to it, it is mine to use, sell or publish only (or my clients for first series rights, if agreed) and if I then find it or part of it being reproduced, plagiarised, churned back out verbatim or otherwise used without permission in print or online in breach of copyright law, the person or site doing it gets served in short order.

I don't piss about any more trying to debate the fine details with sites/people that do it, I just serve them the docs, and advise them to contact a specialist lawyer if they are unclear as to whether what they have done is permissible ("there was no copyright notation on it!" "Copyright doesn't apply online!"), because I know the remit of the law and that I am entitled to protect my own work, as is anyone else.

 

 

 

[With extreme apologies to "Starcoaster" - but as the above clearly wasn't Shakespeare, I assume there is no problem!..........]

Edited by alan_fincher
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Confused what has a link to a 7O's cigar advert got to do with narrowboatworld shamelessly copying and pasting the work of others....

 

It's not "the work" of others. It's just some news. You and Mr Fincher need to look up plagiarism in the dictionary.

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It's not "the work" of others. It's just some news. You and Mr Fincher need to look up plagiarism in the dictionary.

 

from the OED:

 

the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

 

 

So when a BBC local new journalist produces some copy for a web-site, that is not "their work" then, just a "bit of news"?

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It's not "the work" of others. It's just some news. You and Mr Fincher need to look up plagiarism in the dictionary.

I am afraid you are incorrect, I think we are both clear on the definition.

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