I’d give it a D-

I remember being in grade school and having to do a report on a country. It was beat into us that we should not copy the books that we used word for word. That would be cheating. Later we’d learn that it is called plagiarism and is akin to stealing and lying. So the common technique as we learned how to write, was to change a few words here and there, and call it our own.

That worked for the first few reports, but we had to mature our writing to go beyond simply changing a few words, to summarizing what was written in our own words. By the time we reached high school, we were expected to be able to distill several sources of information into a unique paper that represented our own conclusions.

If you look at my article Practical CSS at A List Apart, you will see that I have done precisely that, citing a number of sources of both inspiration, if not actual CSS and markup. The descriptions, explanations, and fully fleshed out examples were in my own words. Given the popularity of this piece, which is now 3 years old, and that ALA chose to run it in the first place, I’d feel pretty confident in giving it an A.

When I republished the piece as a series of several articles at Real World Style, I explicitly put the CSS and associated markup into the public domain. And I just as explicitly made sure that the content of the articles, as well as the images remained under my own copyright.

So it was with great interest that I clicked on a link in an email from Peter Ong, tipping me to this “article”. It starts out well enough, but soon devolves into the grade school technique of “change a few words here and there and call it my own!”

Consider, from the ALA article:

“Splitting the Difference

“A similar layout that is typically solved with tables is essentially the opposite of the above. Instead of meeting in the middle, you might want to place two elements at opposite sides of the browser window. This might be a case where you have a small logo that you want at the top right corner of your page, and some navigational elements at the top left:

[example]

“Here we will use the same DIV.ROW, but different SPANs than we did for aligning the FORM elements with their labels. The SPAN on the left will float left, and contain left-aligned text. The SPAN on the right will float right and contain right-aligned text.”

From the article in question:

“Inline positioning

“A layout that is typically solved with tables is essentially the opposite of the above. Instead of meeting in the middle, you might want to place two elements at opposite sides of the browser window. This might be a case where you have a small logo that you want at the top right corner of your page, and some navigational elements at the top left:

[example]

“Here we will use the same DIV.ROW, but different SPANs than we did for aligning the FORM elements with their labels. The SPAN on the left will float left, and contain left-aligned text. The SPAN on the right will float right and contain right-aligned text.”

If this were handed in as a college paper, it would fail and put the author in jeopardy of being expelled for plagiarism. It wasn’t written as a college paper, though, so I’d give it a D-.

At least he did cite his primary source at the end of the article.

And something about this page looks familiar, too…

Comments

Congratulations Mark! You made it!

Seriously, there’s much of truth in that saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I can see that on the tons of Chinese SpongeBob paraphernalia I see at stores here… they wouldn’t bother to copy it if it weren’t a hit with kids.

But you’re right - in a field such as tech essays (specially if you’re not as widely known as a TV cartoon character) it is much harder to tell which is the genuine article and which is a copycat. At least you have this space to prove it wrong…

And copycats always get caught anyway. Which only should make your points stronger I think.

Posted by: beto on September 2, 2004 12:05 PM

Hi Mark, There appears to be a growing ignorance about plagerism and fair use but I think this guy is old enough to know better (did you read his resume?). Have you sent him a polite email? And of course there is always http://www.pirated-sites.com

This kind on nonsense goes beyond highschool:

My wife had to participate in one of those odious group activities during her degree studies (you know the type: get groups of students to collectively produce fewer papers so the lecturer can spend more time at the pub) Two of the participants in her group were obviously plagerising work (“found” on the web no less). She and another student reported this and stated they wanted no part of it as it would reflect on their credentials. The outcome was that my wife and the other student had to produce another paper at the eleventh hour while the other students handed in plagerised work. My wife passed but so did the others. Not a blink from the faculty.

Posted by: gavin on September 2, 2004 06:29 PM

It’s kind of odd, but I’m not really that upset about it. The guy is clearly in the wrong, but it’s not like I’m losing work to him, or even any traffic, for that matter. I guess what gets me is the lack of moral fiber of these people who believe they are doing nothing wrong.

For example, in the recent case of a design company lifting the Web Standards Awards design and calling it their own[1], they came back with the common reply of “We hired some freelance guy to do the work and had no idea.”

I’ve heard that excuse so many times that I no longer believe it. And the bottom line is that those in charge of the company are ultimately responsible, maybe not at fault, but they shouldn’t be trying to pass the buck.

At any rate, the guy who lifted my work is from Denmark and for all I know meant for the page to be an internal thing, not really public. And he did link to the original work (granted it’s hard to find that link because of some poor CSS/markup on his part). So my post was just letting me get it off my chest. I’m not interested in starting anything with him, so I haven’t emailed him. Maybe I’ll send him a link to this post…

[1]: http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2004/09/baftaawardwinningdesignthieves/

Posted by: Mark Newhouse on September 3, 2004 09:45 AM

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In which Mark pontificates about plagiarism...

September 2, 2004 | design

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