Tam Harbert

With the explosion of online publishing, many people are now posting words on the web and calling themselves journalists. But a good proportion of them are more like plagiarists.

I recently got a first-hand lesson in this. While preparing to pitch a story idea to an editor, I googled “mainframes and private cloud computing.” Not the most interesting topic in the world, and not one that’s been widely covered. So I wasn’t surprised when a story that I’d done earlier in the year popped up several times on the first page of the search results. (My publisher owns lots of magazines and buys the rights to run my stories in all of them.)

But I was looking for fresh information, so I went to the second and third page of the search results. I clicked on a link at a website purporting to cover all-things-cloud. As I read the article I found there, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Here was an executive at IBM being quoted saying the exact same things about mainframe computers that he had told me. I know these guys are often coached on their “messaging,” but these were specific comments to specific questions that I’d asked during our interview. It was clear that the writer had lifted them from my article. There was no mention of my article nor the publication in which it appeared. It sounded as if the author had interviewed the IBM executive himself.

I notified my editor of the plagiarism and she kicked it to her higher ups to see what to do. The answer: not much.

“At any given time hundreds (possibly thousands) of Web sites are republishing entire stories [from our publications] without our permission,” says the response that my editor e-mailed to me. “About 50% of the time, we wind up doing nothing.” The publisher will take action under several circumstances, including when it’s a professional publisher’s site, when the site is running ads alongside the content, or when the site is plagiarizing entire stories repeatedly. But most of the people who do this “are lay publishers who’ve never heard of the Fair Use law and have no understanding of search engine optimization. They often think they’re doing us a favor, in fact.”

In other words, many of these so-called publishers think plagiarism is OK. How depressing.

Nevertheless, my publisher suggests that editors contact the offending site and nicely ask them to remove the story or at least acknowledge and link to the original source.

In my case, there was no contact information on the website for the writer, nor the editor. In fact, there was no information on who was publishing or funding the website. Clicking the “about” tab told me only that the site was launched in 2009, is done with “a team of content creators from around the globe” and “is one of the fastest growing cloud computing media sites on the Web.” I clicked on “contact,” and got only a form to fill out. There was no address, phone number or e-mail. This is not uncommon. Even when a publisher wants to take legal action against plagiarism, the lawyers sometimes can’t find anyone to which they can address a cease and desist order.

My editor and I tracked down the writer through LinkedIn – he happens to be an MBA student at a major U.S. university – and sent him an e-mail about the offense. Within an hour, we received a response from his publisher:

“After reviewing the article and discussing with [the writer], we have no problems citing your article regarding the quote. [The writer] had mentioned that he did not realize that this was an exclusive. Eitherway [sic], we’ll make the change to the article citing [your publication] as a source of the quote. We’ve also indicated to [the writer] to clearly define the source of any future quotes.”

It was not signed by an actual person, but rather with the name of the website itself, so we still do not know who runs the operation. Likewise, the return e-mail was the generic email@thewebsite.com.

Lay publisher, indeed. The fact that this publisher thinks that it’s OK to use any content that is not marked as “exclusive” shows his lack of publishing experience, not to say his disrespect of copyright law.

This whole thing piqued my curiosity, so I used an online plagiarism detector, called Duplichecker, to search for other sites that might be lifting the same article. I put in the quote from the IBM guy, and found that the entire story had been lifted, verbatim, unattributed to me or the original publication, in a Middle East computer news site as well. Just as I was working up a slow burn, however, I realized that it was affiliated with a sister publication of the original publication. Of course, my original publisher has the right to republish my story all over the world in its own related publications.

As I start 2012, I’m making a New Year’s resolution to launch my own little battle against online plagiarism. I plan to regularly use Duplichecker or something similar (googling “online plagiarism detector” brings up several free ones) to see where pieces of my stories are popping up. I may not be able to stop it, but I can at least try to educate the offenders, one plagiarist at a time.

Something’s rotten in the technology industry, and the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission is trying to root it out.

In December, the SEC brought fraud charges against mid-level executives at Flextronics International Ltd., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Dell. These men had been “consulting” part-time over the last two to three years for expert network firm Primary Global Research LLC. The four were allegedly paid more than $400,000 to participate in calls with Wall Street hedge firms and traders — calls that it turns out the Federal Bureau of Investigation had wire-tapped.

The SEC complaint charges that these managers shared material non-public information about their companies, and it includes quotes from transcripts of the taped calls to illustrate. In an October 2009 call, for example, a Flextronics senior director of business development tells a trader that Apple is coming out in the spring with a new iPhone (presumably the iPhone 4) that will include two cameras, a five megapixel auto-focus camera, and a VGA forward-facing video conferencing camera. He also reveals that Flextronics expects to start building the new phone in March. (The iPhone 4 started shipping in June.)

A Dec. 20 Wall Street Journal article says that this is just “the first major shoe to drop” in a three-year investigation. The investigators seem to be following a trail that began with the insider trading charges filed against the Galleon Group and its founder Raj Rajaratnam in late 2009. Former AMD Chairman Hector Ruiz has been tied to the Galleon investigation, although he has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Former high-level IBM executive Robert W. Moffat Jr., however, pleaded guilty to leaking inside information about IBM, Lenovo and Advanced Micro Devices in the Galleon case. Last fall he was sentenced to six months in jail. In the charges filed last month against the tech executives, the SEC describes a secret witness, “an individual who had substantial experience evaluating public companies in the semiconductor and technology industries.” The WSJ story identified that witness as Karl Motey, a technology analyst who had a business connection with a hedge-fund manager charged in the Galleon case.

One of the WSJ’s sources said that Motey made calls, presumably as a client of Primary Global, to corporate managers at more than 60 companies, gathering evidence for the government. It won’t surprise me if all 60 of those tech companies are eventually implicated. The growing scandal reflects the continuing cozy relationship between the tech industry and Wall Street. Over the course of my 25-year career reporting on this business, I’ve often been amazed by how chummy the two groups are. In tech, where so much of salary and compensation rides on initial public offerings and stock options, and where much of a company’s financial success depends on the technology the company is bringing to the market, these relationships may be a natural outgrowth. But, perhaps because so many tech companies grew out of the Silicon Valley’s venture capital culture – in which inside information is not criminal, but rather, the stock in trade (pun intended) of the business – there seems to be widespread nonchalance, even disregard, of SEC regulations designed to protect the interests of ordinary investors.

Every few years, it seems the SEC makes a run at reining in the abuses at tech companies. Five years ago, for example, it investigated a bunch of tech companies – including Analog Devices, Broadcom and Apple – for allegedly backdating stock options. Apparently, many companies routinely changed the date on which their boards approved stock options, moving it from the real date to an earlier date so that the options would benefit from a recent rise in the stock price. Companies are still dealing with the legal fallout from that scandal.

It will be interesting to see who else the SEC catches in this latest net. Indeed, just a few days ago, Reuters reported that court documents recently filed in the Galleon case named a former senior marketing director at Akamai Technologies Inc. as a source who allegedly provided inside information to a trader. Will all this lead to changes in tech industry practices? Unless dozens of high-profile execs get charged, convicted, and sent to jail, history indicates that the odds are against it.

(For more details on the individuals involved and the information they shared, read my blog post on EBN Online.)

As a writer, I believe strongly in the concept of copyright, retaining the rights to the work by which creative professionals earn their living. But I have a confession to make. Ever since I launched my website, I’ve been operating in a gray area when it comes to the copyright on images.

I strongly suspect, however, that I’m not alone. How many of you out there – yes, you writers and bloggers – verify the copyright and obtain permission if required for every image you use from the Web?

I thought so. Me, too.

Initially, I was concerned about using the magazine covers on my website. Still am. But the images are so small I’m betting these publishers won’t give me grief about it. At any rate, it’s probably fair use.

But I faced another copyright challenge once I figured out how to add images to my blog posts. I’ve tried to be careful, but it’s not easy – in fact it often seems impossible – to figure out whether images are copyrighted. A Google search for mountains, for example, yields more than 37 million images. If I start clicking through these, a few are obviously copyrighted – they carry the familiar copyright symbol, ©. But most do not. Of course, the law no longer requires a work to display the © symbol for copyright protection. In fact, when I click on any image, Google warns me that “This image may be subject to copyright.” When I click further to go to the original source – which may be a commercial website, someone’s blog, or even a variety of websites that claim to offer “free” images, it’s never clear whether the image is copyrighted. There is no copyright notice on the photo, although there is a copyright notice at the bottom of the website. Presumably this copyrights the website, but not the photo.

When I attended the Future of Freelancing conference last summer, one presenter mentioned that a good way to find images available for legal use was to search Creative Commons (CC). I’ve tried, but remain baffled. Right off the bat, the home page tells me:

“Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link. Since there is no registration to use a CC license, CC has no way to determine what has and hasn’t been placed under the terms of a CC license. If you are in doubt you should contact the copyright holder directly, or try to contact the site where you found the content.”

In addition, Creative Commons offers a confusing array of different types of licenses that specify different conditions under which I may use the work. So even if I figure out it’s licensed under Creative Commons, I still have to decipher exactly how I’m allowed to use it.

All this means that locating and verifying an image often takes as long as writing the blog post. Sometimes longer. Occasionally, I actually discover the copyright owner and ask for permission. The outpouring of gratitude tells me how widescale this problem is.

Here’s what Richard Krzemien, the author of the cartoon I used in last week’s post, told me about copyright infringement: “I used to keep close track of copyright problems, but honestly it can become a full time job. That’s why I took most of my comics down from the site. And all that’s available are the low resolution versions online. I figure it’s the cost of doing business. So I greatly appreciate you contacting me for permission.”

I’m sure what I’ve run into is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of copyright infringement on the Web. Come to think of it, that would make a good illustration for this post. There are 1.5 million images of iceberg tips on Google. I wonder which ones are legal?