Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons) takes on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek for lifting press releases and claiming the text as his own.
I think this is an important thing to keep in mind. Plagiarism is stealing, and if bloggers want to be treated as journalists they have to adhere to the ethical standards of the community. I don’t know how many times I saw the official VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 announcement reposted this week in various forms on various blogs. It just makes me think that folks doing that sort of thing need to be careful about their attributions.
I am definitely not accusing anybody of plagiarism[0], just reminding folks to be mindful that reposting other’s work, even a press release, is walking a fine line between stealing and adding value.
The FSJ article is interesting and short, as is the article he links to entitled “When does sloppy attribution become plagiarism?”
[0] The posts I checked had decent attributions, even if it was a straight-up repost of the content.