Two interesting stories today about publicly taking others' work without credit.
1. Best-selling author Chris Anderson acknowledged that sections of his new book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" were copied without attribution from Wikipedia. Waldo Jacquith, an observant reviewer from the Virginia Quarterly Review, discovered the identical passages. The New York Times ArtsBeat blog wrtoe:
[Anderson in a phone interview] said he originally wrote the sections using the material from Wikipedia in quotations, and had hoped to cite them using footnotes. But while Mr. Anderson wanted to provide a URL address in the notes, he said the publisher wanted to add a time stamp as well. Mr. Anderson objected, on the grounds that Wikipedia pages change constantly as users update them. "It felt archaic and clumsy," he said. Such notes, he said, "would be months out of date."
Read the Virginia Quarterly Review analysis, look at the comparisons, and see if you agree with Anderson's explanation.
2. TED took down a video in which Chris Hughes demonstrated a technology called "augmented reality" using Flash video after many commenters protested that the demo was based on two software projects that Hughes didn't mention (a commenter noted that "Chris conveniently forgets to mention the projects which are about 95% of the work, but does remember his own name twice").
Here's Hughes' explanation of the situation.
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