If it's on the internet, you will be found out

If you’ve missed the copyright follies kerfuffle that blew up a few days ago, the basic facts of the case are these:

1. an author is alerted by a friend that an article she wrote some time back about medieval apple pie recipes had appeared in a magazine called Cook’s Source;
2. author had never heard of the magazine, nor authorized the article to be used;
3. investigates and discovers her article was lifted almost wholesale and reprinted (without permission or payment);
4. contacts the editor for (very humble) redress…
5. and gets the most jaw-dropping response basically ever.
6. Including be told she should be grateful that the editor stole her words and used them without permission. I am totally not kidding. You really need to read the editor’s email for yourself to get the full effect of unintentional hilarity.

I’ve been following this saga for a couple of days now and I’m still gobsmacked by the idiocy on display. I especially love the lecturing, finger-shaking tone of the so-called editor’s reply to the author. What cheek! Not to mention her “editing” of recipes that used their medieval spellings, since that time period was, you know, the point of the article she stole them from. Nevermind the whole “anything on the internet is public domain” headdeskery. (Oh yes, the editor really said that.) Holy ignorance of copyright, Batman!

So I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that this isn’t some rogue editor who’s off the reservation — this magazine has been lifting articles right and left from pretty much the entire internet and publishing it all as their own content. And they shot for the moon, too — Food Network, Martha Stewart, Disney…. Whooo boy. Clearly someone has never heard of corporate lawyers and the scariness thereof.

They’re getting the High Holy Hammer of all Smackdowns, though. Thanks to Neil Gaiman, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Boing Boing, Reddit, and Gawker, the can of worms they opened up for themselves is going to eat them alive. Seriously, when there’s a Facebook page dedicated to listing all the entities you’ve plagiarized from, and the entire internet has gleefully piled on? Life as you know it is over, Red Rover.

What kills me about this whole thing is how completely people still underestimate the power of the internet. The operators of this magazine have obviously been getting away with this unethical behavior for years, but it takes hubris the size of Everest to think you can get away with such shenanigans indefinitely when it’s all online. And then to have such a jaw dropping response from the magazine’s editor…surely they weren’t surprised when basically the entire internet said OH HELL NO in reply. I mean in the age of Twitter, who can possibly still think that something like this won’t explode faster than you can say “Iranian election protests”?

Update on Friday, November 12, 2010 at 1:46 PM by Writer's Cramp

So Cooks Source issued an apology. (Key components reproduced here, since I’m not sure how long that apology will remain on the Cooks Source site.) As mea culpas go, this one is spectacularly feeble despite basically making their entire website the apology. But hardly surprising, given an organization so incredibly clueless about copyright and plagiarism. Their new procedures notwithstanding, they don’t seem to quite get that they aren’t the wronged party here.

Comments

[Kim]

Oh, wow. I hadn't followed it too closely. Heard about it through various writer friends so knew about the editor's incredible nerve and stupidity. I did't see the part where they'd been stealing copy from all over the place that way.

[Writer's Cramp]

Pretty ballsy, no? I especially love that they've stolen from Disney, considering the reputation The Mouse has for defending their copyrights and trademark. I predict that magazine is not long for this world.

[Anne Hawley]

Hasn't it been fun following that story? I heard that one of the big-name cooks--Paula Deen? Nigella Lawson?--had alerted her lawyers.

I like your point best, though: that there's no longer any excuse for ignorance of what the internet can (and almost certainly will) do to you. The concepts of secrecy, privacy, and ephemerality of information are all being killed off by the internet. Mourn or dance as you see fit, but prepare, because it's irreversible.

I love that all the apple-pie woman asked for was an apology and a (delightfully ironic) $130 donation to the top journalism school. Never, I imagine, was a moment of stinginess more regretted.

[Writer's Cramp]

Right? Like, if they'd just conceded to her request, they might have happily continued this behavior for some time before getting caught. It's probable it wouldn't have garnered as much attention when it finally did get uncovered, in that scenario. Oh schadenfreude, so delicious.

I think the more precise point about the internet and how it's changing concepts of secrecy and privacy isn't quite that those two things are being killed off, so much as the old ways of operating with the assumptions of secrecy and privacy are being killed off. Secrecy and privacy exist (the former probably moreso than the latter these days) and will continue, but no longer can people rely on the cover of the non-networked world to protect their secrets and privacy. That is, when we're given the tools to essentially compare notes with one another, the secrets that depended on the right hand not knowing what the left is doing is crumbling.

Privacy is a trickier thing, although that's as much attributable to our own degrading of that concept of privacy in the societal sphere as it is to the digital revolution, imo. We've ceded far more ground on the privacy front than would have been necessitated by the growth and ubiquity of Web 2.0.