Plagiarism is back in blog discussions again after another apparent piece of fat-fingered filching from Talbot street’s Indo group.

I won’t be taking quite the same line as the McGarr Solicitors blog (as it takes in such lofty matters as whether the People’s Republic of China has managed the previously unconsidered feat of plagiarising the Moon)

Rather, I thought I’d address (from my sickbed) the more mundane question of what you can do if you find your own work being passed off under someone else’s name.

The answer lies in what the work was worth to you.

There is no crime of plagiarism. Try to report an instance to the police if you don’t believe me. [UPDATE: TJ points out that in my muddled state I've forgotten S144 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, which does say that a person who make available in the course of a business trade or profession "a copy of a work which is, and which he or she knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of the work, shall be guilty of an offence."]So if you wanted to take a legal action (and I raise this as an option only because instances of plagiarism frequently prompt exhortations of legal action from bystanders not on risk) what could you claim?

Well, if you were Redmum, say, and found that your photograph had been taken from Flickr and used on the front page of the Metro daily freesheet you could reasonably expect some form of payment. Indeed payment, though not a published credit, for her work was a happy endingin that case.

But what if you’re put out because your blog words have appeared under a journalist’s name in a newspaper now assembled in Talbot Street?

The problem here is that if you wanted to claim damages they would have to be based on your actual losses (or at least losses you could convincingly argue arise from the event). Now if this article is reproduced, verbatim, in next week’s Evening Fleabite what income or monies have I lost? Sadly, none. I made these words available for free. I’m not selling them to you the reader, so I can hardly claim the copied article has undercut me.

Under these circumstances, all that bloggers have to fall back on to discourage plagiarism is naming and shaming. This has drawbacks.

Firstly, it doesn’t appear to be a major source of shame in many Irish newspapers to have published plagiarised material. Indeed, as this tale suggests, the paper will sometimes react to the information by merely attempting to hide the article from the original author, rather than taking it down and looking into how their reader protection processes failed so dramatically.

There is a secondary problem for a blogger who finds themselves wronged by a journalist from the Independant News & Media Group’s stable of newspapers. This is the open hostility of the O’Reilly family to the internet- and bloggers in particular. It can hardly be a coincidence that the newspaper group whose owners and controllers have the most open contempt for-and hostility towards-bloggers is the one whose writers feel most able to steal from them.

Some quotes from Gavin O’Reilly’s recent speech to the Society of Editors-”The USP of the newspaper of the future [will be] built upon journalistic skills that are not simply a God-given right of someone with attitude sitting in a garage in front of a computer, but rather is a skill that is learned and earned.”
…
“Over the past two years, we have radically restructured our internal work flows… The result is that our journalists are now better focussed on crafting content that truly makes us distinctive”

Crafting content takes time- it’s an artisan approach. Until that distinctive stuff is finished I suppose we’ll all have to make do with the blogswipes.

Fergal of this parish will be proposing a motion at the Labour Party Conference this evening on behalf of the Labour Lawyers group.

I thought I’d try to put up the stream from the podium here.

Fingers crossed, I can get it working.

Inspired by the Chipwrapper website, I’ve built a custom Google search engine which searchs though the websites of all the Irish news sources I can find online. So far, I have the Times (paywall blocks reading most of the stories returned, sadly), RTE, the Indo stable of papers, the Examiner, the Star (kind of), the Sunday Business Post and the bits of Magill and Village magazine which are searchable online. Let me know if I’ve missed anyone.

Feel free to see if anyone in the newsy world has been talking about you. Or, if you think you’re more likely to make the news next week, set an alert for yourself to be told when they do. Here’s the main Search Page. But I’ll let you try it out here too.

Also, as the first pair of what will be a wider range of rss feeds, also based on the Chipwrapper code, here are two links. One gives you the top headlines from all the national newspapers and RTE. The other gives you a range of top sport stories from all sources.

RSS: Irish News Headlines.
RSS: Irish Sports Headlines

I’ll be popping my head into the Open Coffee meeting in the Morrison Hotel this morning. If you’re there, I’ll see you. If you wish you were there, why not just turn up too. They seem like friendly sorts.

Say Aah!

Originally uploaded by Editor_Tupp

A few weeks ago, I decided to encourage Fustar in his life-affirming journey through China’s finest playthings, Manky Toy Monday. I bought a few likely lads myself intending to remind him of the joys of a Manky Toy.

But before I could write my own gizmo guides, he sprang back into life with two new manky toy spectaculars- now with video!

My own contribution remains second best, but I offer to you today the mighty wonders of the euphoniously named “My First Super Shot Ball Game”. Sharing one of the more surprising traits of other Manky Toys, we are urged to Collect Them All!.

Photos of the alternative games in the series reveal what appear to be three Super Shot Ball Games, differing only in their plastic hues. But what is a Super Shot Ball Game? A game so addictive, and universally popular, that it can be asserted with certainty that this will be merely the first in a long lifetime of Super Shot Balling, obviously.

Or, in the alternative, a small one player version of Hungry Hippos.

Only a proper description of the game will help you decide which is your truth. A plastic dog sits crouched inside a clear dome. A cannon points directly at his head. You shoot balls out of this cannon by means of a springed mechanism attached to the outside of the dome. He can’t move to avoid the cannon balls. The dome doesn’t leave him any room for escape. The only way he can stop the balls from hitting him in the face at full speed is to catch them in his mouth and swallow them. This is recognised by stage magicians as one of the most dangerous tricks in their profession. Most would hesitate at a single bullet catch. By necessity, our canine captive must catch as many cannon balls in his mouth as you fire at him.

And, as the flicking motion of a properly used cannon mechanism can build up into a regular volley of balls shooting at the dog’s head, the swallowing motion has to become almost reflexive. The method by which the balls are recycled from the dog to the cannon is the final indignity. It is this last factor that makes clear that what we are playing with is a representation of one of the nastier punishments in Hades.

The odd thing about playing Super Shot Ball is that you start off thinking how rubbish it is. Then you get the rhythm going and you manage to get your first ball into the dogs mouth. Immediately a compulsion to continue shooting balls into his mouth grips you- a compulsion beyond the rational, in my experience. If you break the flicking rhythm in any way and end up shooting him in the face, the sense of frustration drives you straight back to the task.

One question remains. If the packaging on this Super Shot Ball declares itself in print to be “My First”, and I buy a second one, how will it know?

Some time ago, Eoghan McCabe ran a little competition to drive up his rss subscribers. I didn’t win, but was granted an unexpected consolation prize. He’d had a look around Tuppenceworth (the real, main Tuppenceworth.ie site) and had liked what he’d seen.

So we had a meeting for pasta and tea during the week. I enthused about Tuppenceworth. He nodded in the slightly overwhelmed manner people use when they’re first exposed to my enthusiasm. We briefly discussed why it might be a good idea to really really pay attention to contracts. And then we agreed that Eoghan would send me some reference links to various site designs.

I asked him why he’d been interested in Tuppenceworth to start with and he said that it was clear that it was something made with love and that’s what a good designer wants to work on. Anyone who thinks like that is someone I’ll trust.

Exciting times ahead. The end should be a rebirth of something I’m very proud of, but have been unable to give the attention it needed in its current form.

Lucinda McNally is writing a thesis on the impact of blogging on the Irish Election. She sent me a set of questions, which I’ll reproduce later today with her blessing, together with my answers.

She also sent me a second set of brass tacks questions, suggested after a meeting with a supervisor cynical about blogs. I’m going to throw those out to everyone to answer, either in the comment or on their own blogs. It’s all in the name of education.

What are your aims and objectives with the blog?
Do you reach these objectives?
Do you think your blog is effective?
How often is your blog updated?
How is your blog funded?
How do people know about your blog? Do you market your blog?
Who are your target audience? Do you reach this target audience? How do you know?
Who leaves comments on your blog? How many comments are left?
What are the advantages of your blog?
What are the disadvantages?
Does your blog have an impact on other media? How?
Do other media have an impact on your blog? How?
Why would people bother going on to a blog? (this is the question I got earlier!!!)
Do you think YOUR blog has had any impact on the general election? How?

Visits to RTE tend to be rare occurances for me. The last time I was there, Pat Kenny tripped over the mat in the front door and went in to a paroxym of rage. A few minutes later an assistant came down with a doleful looking man with a toolbelt and had him move the circular mat 90 degrees.

No such flooring excitement today. For one thing the front door is still bashed in from when your man made his protest for road safety by crashing his car into it.

Instead I was invited to appear, with Sinead Gleeson and Una Mullally, on Seoige and O’Shea.

A thankfully imperfect copy can be seen here courtesy of RedMum.

Feedback afterwards was generally good, and I feel it was a fine performance by all. Drawbacks centre around the text messages asking if I had been tangoed, and the unhappy discovery that the camera angle might have been perfectly chosen to highlight my lack of a well defined jaw-line. Checking my stats at the end of the night, I see there was a spike of some 20 extra visitors to tuppenceworth after the show. I’d like to welcome you all and invite you to take a good look around.

The site with the videos I was talking about is VoteTube.org.

Who knows what the Sunday World, or the Evening Herald will fill their pages with now? The Gardai have been fined €70,000 for breach of privacy after the High Court held them responsible for leaking information to a newspaper. We might anticipate a break from such leaks for a week or two.

I mention those two papers, because they make the most of stories based on the uncritical, and uncorroborated, repetition of tales told from the barrack room. The Sunday World is currently running a bus ad campaign. Beside a photograph of a gimlet-eyed Paul Williams, they pose the question “Who keeps an eye on the bad guys?”.

The problem with these papers’ approach to crime reporting is twofold. Firstly, it is useless. Unless they’re actually finding new evidence of crimes, which can be used to convict, what purpose does it serve to print leaks from an ongoing investigation?

Secondly, and more importantly, it is corrosive of the administration of justice. This week’s finding touches on the gardai using the willingness of the press to pursue released criminals. But despite all their hysteria over crime, the papers and their police sources are handing those written about a defence on a plate.

Even over the Weekend of the 10th-12th November 2006 the Herald in particular was happy to print details of an ongoing Garda investigation, including their police source’s opinion of who the guilty party was as fact. You may recall that it was this kind of coverage which saw Charles Haughey escape criminal prosecution.

However from a Paper Round point of view, the corruption isn’t just one way. A reliance on the police force as the source for your scoops undermines a paper’s, and certainly a reporter’s, independence. Both Paul Reynolds of RTE and Paul Williams of the Sunday World are regularly now used by the rest of the media as proxy Garda spokesmen- demanding that the police be freed of ‘politically correct’ oversight so they can start to ‘think like villains’ or be freed from the need to produce evidence in court to obtain convictions.

When a reporter becomes a recognised mouthpiece for an institution, they’ve ceased to put their duty to their readers first. More damagingly, the paper they write for is compromised and inhibited from putting that institution under the microscope, for fear the flow of ersatz exclusives dries up.

And that’s when this kind of reporting really does its readers a disservice. It’s another area where the myth of the fourth estate evaporates on contact with reality.

Just in case there are any readers of Adam Maguire‘s article in this Sunday’s Business Post who have arrived to take a look at the guide to video sharing sites’ Terms and Conditions- here’s the link:

Video Sharing Sites Terms and Conditions: A legal drive-by

I hope I might be able to interest you in an idea I’ve had floating around my head for a while. Just as a once off, I’d like to recruit bloggers (and non-bloggers too) to read the papers over one weekend. Specifically, over next weekend.

Not one paper, or two, but as many as possible. Ideally, to read them all. (Though I’m not sure if anyone would have the time to read everything). And to read them with a critical eye- to note down when news reports don’t tally with what they know, or when columnist’s arguments don’t make sense. Or when they seem to be intent on talking about something that has nothing to do with you.

Above all, to try to articulate what, if anything, we’d like to see improved in the papers on our shelves by clearly identifying where they seem to have fallen down.

To try to inject a little fun into the exercise, I propose to set up shop in a city centre venue (that’s Dublin city centre, if you’re near another city) from 1pm with a huge pile of papers on Saturday and Sunday. Somewhere with chairs, drink and brunch-styles munches. Who knows, somebody might turn up and start blogging from the place there and then. I thought the Mezzanine in the Westin Hotel has pretty nice comfy sofas to sit and read at. Suggestions of alternative venues welcome.

Feel free to drop in, if you’re in town, or to read your own paper at home and contribute your thoughts from there. (If you’d like to, tag it paperround so they can all be found easily).

And, if you want, ask your friends to come along, bring partners and/or kids (of reading age or otherwise).

Its a kind of a meet-up, but also an experiment.

Speaking for myself, I think that the standard of newspapers has fallen in the past, say 5 years. And I think Ireland needs a strong, active and questioning press. And having been involved in, for example, court cases which I didn’t recognise when I read some of the reports, I’ve started to wonder if what I read is even factually accurate. I think that if a group of even semi-alert weekend readers start to examine what we’re given we might (perhaps) find that the authority of print starts to drain away quite quickly.

To try to get the widest spread of snapshots (Workday, Saturday and Sunday papers) I’ll also be buying all the daily papers on Friday. But, as I don’t have the day off work, I’m afraid there won’t be any lounging around then.

Let me know what you think.

A little while ago I added Treemo to my list of Video sharing sites whose Terms and Conditions I forced myself to read for your benefit.

Well, Treemo’s Aaron Racine responded as so:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about our Terms and Conditions (T&C). Later on in the paragraph you’re quoting from, we say:

“You may terminate or restrict our rights to use your User Submissions by changing the rights granted on the permissions page of your account.???

and:

“The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the HyperBoy Website, however, HyperBoy does retain deleted works for up to 30 days for review.???

Our intent is to give content producers control over their content, and the (intended) spirit of the T&C is that “perpetual??? only exists while their content is 1) on our site and 2) publicly viewable (as determined by the producer). In case you haven’t looked beyond our T&C, we do allow producers to reserve all rights to their content, place it into the public domain, or select from one of six Creative Commons licenses. Additionally, we allow producers to limit the audience of any piece of content by allowing them to specify custom groups of community members that should have viewing permission.

We will look into making the “perpetual??? issue more clear in our T&C. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

and I had this to say in response;

Hello Aaron,
Thanks for your response- its great to see somebody answering these concerns. I signed up to your service to take a look around the options you outlined.
In reply to your comments below, I offer the following notes and observations:

Perpetual is forever. Not forever until something else happens. That would be the construction put on it in any legal forum.

Producers may reserve their rights in your settings, but those rights include the right to licence their content. As a licence agreement your terms and conditions as currently drafted trump any claims made in that setting.

The licence purports to terminate on removal and deletion- but once a ‘permanent’ licence has been granted, I’m afraid it would be a weak argument for a producer to rely on this termination clause.

Bottom line, while participation in Treemo is dependent on signing up to the terms of service as they’re currently drafted, I wouldn’t put up my work on it.

The final part of the exchange came by email. Aaron replied;

Thanks for the reply. I was definitely not the one that drafted the legal wording on our site =) I do, however, care if the T&C are not in line with our intent. Sounds like we shouldn’t have the word perpetual in there. We’ll have to consult with a lawyer (again). Thanks for the heads-up and for your time =)

We’ll be kind to their lawyer and check again in a month’s time to see if anything has changed.