There’s been a lot of noise lately (and in a dull fashion, for a while) about “plagiarism” of weblog content on the internet. The latest rush was started here by Om Malik. Here’s my take:
- Plagiarism is bad.
- Plagiarism has such a high school English class connotation to it. It does not apply at all to people who are merely re-appropriating words so as to generate web traffic and advertising revenue. Emotionally infused words like “plagiarism” and “stealing” just aren’t useful in this discusssion– we really ought to keep it focused on technology
- This isn’t a “gosh I’m going to take these words because they’re better than I could ever come up with”. It’s more of a “wow, here’s some text that is rich with paritcular keywords that I want. Why don’t I use technology (copy/ paste, weblogs, RSS, etc.) to appropriate this text in a place that I control?