A good title for this column could have been "The Curse of Wikipedia", or perhaps "Copyright and what it means to you". I`ve been the recipient, twice in the last two days, of press releases containing chunks of copy, taken straight out of Wikipedia, and attributed to the spokesdrones/organisations concerned.
Here`s a hint guys: That`s plagiarism. Wikipedia can sue you for it. If we run any of that copy, Wikipedia can sue us for it. And you can bet your bottom dollar we will pass the pain down the line. What`s on Wikipedia is not yours, you have no right to claim that it is just because you`re too lazy to use your brain, and put your own thoughts and opinions on paper.
The problem with the Internet is everything is accessible, available, copy-and-pasteable. People seem to forget that just because it doesn`t require retyping, that the information is free to use, abuse, and plagiarise.
One day, when the Information Age really takes hold, Gartner analyst Bill Hahn said a year or two ago, plagiarism and copyright infringements will be taken seriously as crimes. These activities literally take food out of the mouths of people like me who, as Hahn said, literally "eat their words".
I`ve been the recipient, twice in the last two days, of press releases containing chunks of copy, taken straight out of Wikipedia, and attributed to the spokesdrones/organisations concerned.
Samantha Perry
Wikipedia`s content is available under licence - it`s copyleft rather than copyright. To quote Wikipedia: "The licence Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely.
This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikipedia articles, therefore, will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom."
The people who contribute to Wikipedia do so freely and voluntarily, the least they deserve in return is credit for their efforts. People who live off of the words they write have the right to be rewarded for their efforts.
People who steal these words and pass them off as their own should be locked up - if only for being so ignorant as to be unaware of basic copyright (or left) law, and most definitely for being stupid enough to send their efforts to a journalist.
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