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It’s been bugging me for quite a while now that Medieval News, which many of us rely on for quick updates on the latest hoard, mass grave, or DNA ridonkulousness, is essentially a scraping service with some questionable policies.

From here.

There’s a site that I linked to called Medieval News. It mostly covered items in the news that would be of interest to medievalists. I later stopped linking to them because the site doesn’t support Section 508 standards and just didn’t seem appropriate because it was exceedingly commercial, more so than the average affiliate-linked site (honestly? it was the Evony ads that decided me).

But earlier this week, two Medievalist bloggers, Another Damned Medievalist and Xoom (that’s Meg from Xoom in the blockquote above, who has a followup post here) called the current reprehensible practices of Medievalist News and their main site at Medievalist.net to my attention:

They are plagiarizing other blog posts, copying their text without a citation or a link back.

They are reprinting press releases without identifying them as press releases or linking to the release.

They are not using RSS feeds or a similar automated script to do this; they are doing this by hand. That means they are making deliberate editorial decisions about what to omit.

The news posts usually appear on their Blogspot site here. What they are doing at Medieval News is absolutely not the way bloggers, or scholars, or ethical writers behave. In addition to being a medievalist, I’m also a professional blogger; this site is one of my personal sites, but I blog for pay on a number of other sites. None of my employers would allow me to plagiarize or reprint a press release without a citation and a link.

Here’s the medievalist.net post about the discovery that Giotto frescoes revealed new detail under ultraviolet light. Here’s one of their possible sources (they simply posted a Reuters press release, in its entirety). You will note that Reuters has “Writing by Philip Pullella; editing by Paul Casciato” at the bottom. There’s no attribution on Medieval News.

Now, the person behind Medieval News Peter
Konieczny, claims that:

Now many (for example six of the last seven posts on Medieval News) of the articles I post are based on press releases. They come from universities, museums, publishers, and many, many other organizations. I actually get at least several press releases a day sent directly to me by email, along with various attachments like photos. They are widely used by all media, and it is a standard practice among all media – newspapers, TV, online, etc. to use them and not attribute them.

This is pretty much what a plagiarizing student says on being caught; “everybody else does it.” And my response to Peter, and to that student, is well, no everybody else isn’t doing it. For instance, I didn’t on my post about the Giotto frescoes. I also note that Reuter’s has a copyright statement at the bottom of their article that reads “© Thomson Reuters 2010. All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.” They have a further copyright policy here. I note that those news outlets, like MSNBC and Yahoo have licensed the Reuters content; they’ve paid a licensing fee.

I blog for a newspaper chain at Examiner.com. Even at Examiner, one step above a content mill, were I to use a press release in its entirety and deliberately not include a link, I’d be probably be fired by my editor. It is absolutely not OK.

Now, in the case of the post about pardons in medieval Scotland, Medieval News has not only stripped the original citation and omitted a link back to their source, they’ve added a link to sell a book via their Amazon affiliate link. The original article, by Marilyn Smulders, is here. I’d like you to notice several things:

1. Almost the entire article has been copied, without a citation, without the original author’s name, and without a link to their source.
2. They’ve added a revenue-generating link in the article, in addition to the revenue generating ads on their site, and I’m pretty sure they’re not paying the original author or the article’s rights-holder.
3. They are hot-linking to the image of Dr. Cynthia Neville; which means they are stealing the university’s bandwidth. This is illegal in some countries, and a fair number of server admins will change an image when they find a bandwidth bandit hot-linking. I’ll leave the choice of that image to your imagination, but this can be really embarrassing; don’t hotlink.
4. They editorially removed the last two paragraphs of their source, two paragraphs which are of local interest to Dalhousie University.

This kind of behavior, the stripping of authorial attribution and of localized data that points to a specific source, is called “masking”; it is a deliberate effort to mask copyright theft. It is used in court cases as an indication that the theft was done deliberately and knowingly, and even habitually. Ask your dean of students or whomever deals with plagiarism at your campus, or your friendly local IP attorney. They’re familiar with the practice.

I am appalled, not only as a blogger, and a medievalist, but as an educator. We are always telling our students to cite, to re-write rather than paraphrase exclusively or instead of plagiarizing. As a blogger, I’m equally appalled; links are our citations, and they are crucial.

Only a weasel files off the author data, and omits a link-back.

Tags: copyright, plagiarism

This entry was posted by Lisa L. Spangenberg on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Bloggers, Digital Scholarship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.