Funferal

Plagiarism

Interesting post (and thread) on Metafilter this morning. Seems The Agonist has been quoting reports from Stratfor verbatim, without giving attribution. Sean-Paul at The Agonist claims he just doesn’t have time to always credit others, and that he had never pretended to be sourcing his own information.
Problem is, his excuse of time constraints just doesn’t stand up. While many comments on The Agonist’s site are supportive of his stance, his approach runs against expected standards in the blogosphere. There may not yet be a broadly accepted code of ethics (though there are moves underway to develop one) but the whole idea of links-and-content that is the blog is based on this idea of giving credit, developing the conversation, allowing people to move back to other sources.
Even those who oppose strong, or even any, copyright laws, would generally feel that giving credit to a source (except where information is ‘common knowledge’ or the source doesn’t want accreditation – neither the case here) is the minimum level of politeness due. The main news aggregators follow this practice of allowing you to see where the information is coming from. Just copying and pasting, as Sean-Paul claims to do, is not inherently unethical, but you should credit your source – especially when you’re soliciting donations, as the Agonist is…
[end rant]