Valley Wag on Copyright, Wikipedia, and a Dead Tree Outfit
March 25, 2009
Short take. Click here and read “Is the Los Angeles Times Cribbing from Wikipedia? Valley Wag presents snippets from an LA Times’s story and source or coincidental snippets from Wikipedia. I am no expert in legal matters and copyright, but these snippets looked similar. Maybe it is a coincidence? Maybe it is another example of the ease with which information can be located and possibly repurposed. I haven’t had an original idea or sentence in my goosely life, but I am no journalist. I am not sure what to think. I am afraid to quote an Associated Press story, but if this alleged similarity is valid, the Los Angeles Times seems to operate with some interesting methods.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
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2 Responses to “Valley Wag on Copyright, Wikipedia, and a Dead Tree Outfit”
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Is this just a symptom of the collateral damage from the death of print newspapers? I suggest looking at an article by David Simon who has captured the angst of our times and arguably its history line with “The Wire”. The article is “In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police” at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022703591_pf.html
This is linked by Dave Gilson in “One Good Thing About the Death of Newspapers” http://www.motherjones.com/riff/2009/03/one-good-thing-about-death-newspapers#comments
My take is that just maybe someone or the President will create an I.F. Stone Stimulus Fund and save the best reporters – and not the newspapers as in “U.S. bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers”, a major Drudge Report item today. This also goes to the SEO and talent issue. Is anyone home?
I’m a Wikipedia editor and have experienced sentences and paragraphs I’ve written lifted wholesale by the press. (Specifically from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .) Personally, I felt enormous pride that my words had achieved their educational mission! We do this stuff to make something useful for people, after all.
And I do press for Wikipedia, and I can’t think of a journalist I’ve spoken to in the last few years who *doesn’t* use Wikipedia as their universal handy backgrounding tool. And really, getting value from good but unreliable sources is what journalists do.
I’d like to see the LA Times acknowledge the source in a later edition though 😉