Horst Prillinger:  "At school, you think that if you copy ideas from somebody else's paper, it's cheating. At university we learned that it's okay to copy from stuff somebody else has written - if you cite your sources. Copying and not citing is cheating, copying and citing (and, of course, adding a few ideas of your own) is, believe it or not, scholarly work - because it proves that you have done research, that you read and understood what you found and that you spent some thought on whether you want to use it or not."

In the post that came from, Horst also pointed out my agreement with Loyd Schutte on the issue of citing sources earlier this morning.  If you're a regular reader of jenett.radio (thank you), you probably noticed that I was recently adding a copyright symbol to each of my posts with mouseover text asking that you cite the source(s) if you republish information contained in the entry.  That was a little overkill (I thank Loyd for his valuable feedback last week) and I decided to do away it.  I subsequently tried another approach to the problem - a similar note that appeared with each post in my XML file, but not on my weblog pages.  Then, I felt the repetition of the same note, over and over, in the aggregator must be annoying, so I've stopped doing that, too.  So - what was I trying to accomplish anyway?

I had communicated with several people privately in the last month about their obvious use of my content without citing their source.  It's not about reciprocal links - it's about giving credit to others when you "borrow" their content.  If one doesn't cite their source for non-original content, they're presenting someone else's work as their own.  One of those people turned out to be a total jerk.  The other turned out to be a nicer guy than I thought he was.  I haven't written about this issue (until now, that is) - I've chosen to deal with it privately.  Loyd and Horst have both come out and said things that have been on my mind a bit too much over the last month, giving me the perfect opportunity to express myself through my agreement with them.

That's too easy and they've both taught me a valuable lesson.  Instead of sideway approaches, I should have just come out and said it a month ago, so here it is.  Plagiarism sucks!  Use my content as I use yours.  That's what syndication is all about.  But don't use it if you're not willing to at least give some credit in the process.

Thanks, I feel better now (I think)... 

>>  "When swatting at an errant fly with your hand, there is nothing quite so heart-stopping as actually swatting the fly with your hand. Eeeeeek."  [Coolstop Daily Pick 10/30/02] 

Loyd Schutte:  "People should understand, if it's showing up in your aggregator then someone else deserves credit for the work they did."  Now I understand why he cited me as the source for one of his own posts... thanks Loyd.  ;~)) 

Protected CDs 'should be labelled'.  The music industry risks alienating its core consumers by selling copy-protected CDs without warning labels¸ research suggests.  [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

I'm thinking the music industry has already done an excellent job of "alienating its core consumers." 

The Register:  AOL IM and ICQ to interoperate, at last

Under the terms of the US Federal Communications Commission's approval of the AOL Time Warner merger, AOL is not permitted to launch "advanced IM-based high-speed services (AIHS)" over Time Warner cable until it interoperates. AIHS are presumed to mean video conferencing.

But the company essentially decided against open IM following reluctant interoperability testing with IBM Corp's Lotus SameTime, announcing this summer that it would instead look towards commercial agreements along the lines of the one it struck with Apple Computer Inc. The Apple deal, however, just puts a Mac client on the AIM network.

Perhaps, what AOL is doing should be called "selective interoperability" to differentiate it from the "open, email-style, interoperability" that just isn't happening. 

Killer sends 22-page letter to publisher.  As he prepared to kill his professors and himself, Robert Stewart Flores Jr. mailed a 22-page typewritten letter to Arizona Daily Star publisher Jane Amari that tried to justify Monday's rampage as "a reckoning" and "a settling of accounts."  [Arizona Daily Star] 

October 2002

 


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