Filipino Netiquette and Plagiarism

Yesterday, my friend Rochelle of HeaRty’s Haven and writer for BlogWatch.ph was a victim.  Nearly her entire post on “The New Friendster is Finally Here!” and the images from that post were hijacked on sulit.com.ph by a forum poster/Mod.  The sad part though was, the forum poster didn’t realize he was making a mistake.  The argument from the rowdy crowd on facebook, from that forum and elsewhere was that, Roch should be happy her blog is being exposed.  That those people thought they didn’t do anything wrong because, a citation was made and the forum poster did not claim ownership of the post.  The forum mod argued he didn’t realize he was plagiarizing and was in fact spreading the word.

This was the original post screenshot:

This was the forum:

While the original forum post itself was deleted after it was requested to be taken down and I’m told the guy has apologized to Roch, there is still a copy as of it at Sulit at the time of this publication. This:

Let me explain why it is a big deal and what was wrong:

• Almost 90% of the post was copied.
• Almost all of Roch’s images were copied.
• While it was linked and properly cited, since most of the post was already there, it was an unauthorized republish of Roch’s content.

While it is moot now, and damage has already been done to Roch, not just with the plagiarized post but the grief she had to go through the past few hours, it seems the question is, where is justice for her?

This isn’t an isolated incident.  Roch’s experience is just one of many.  Images from blogs are stolen each day, whether you watermark them or not and entire blog posts are copied.  It happens not just to bloggers like Roch.  It is always a game of cat and mouse.  Big or small the copying game continues.  We all remember “plagiarism and, uh, karen devil? is that you?“  and the case of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Appropriate blogging and acceptable forum posting netiquette or someone else’s work is that you provide:

• a snippet;
• a quote from the post; or
• one to two paragraphs at best.

Then you link back saying, this is where I got it.

As Deborah Ng on Blog Etiquette: The Rules are Quite Simple put it:

Unless you have permission, it’s never OK to post someone else’s words on your own blog. You’re certainly welcome to provide a quote with attribution but to reprint the entire post is not good blog etiquette at all. In fact, it can get your blog shut down and your hosting taken away.

The sad part is that this is a never ending battle.  Noob and veteran bloggers face this challenge everyday.  There will be no end.  Some like Rupert Murdock will argue for example that google indexing his site is bad for his business and that it is the same thing as plagiarizing his content, so he will insist of walling up.  Murdock uses an already precarious situation as a battleground and negotiation tactic and people like him will create a world of data silos.  There is a difference between that and spreading something in its entirety on a forum. Google indexes a site but only displays snippets and of course a link to the page so that people could easily find content.

People from the rowdy crowd on the other hand have this perverse corruption what netiquette is.  They don’t think that pasting an entire post whether it is from a blogger, a news site or wikipedia is plagiarism even when they cite sources. Like a book, it is often fitting to just take a snippet or a quote. You should only take the what’s most relevant to your particular case.

As sour a taste to say it, a case could be made to use the DMCA. Then there is also Creative Commons Licensing as a preventive measure but those aren’t our only weapons. Our biggest obstacle isn’t really plagiarism, it is ignorance and misinterpretation of what is acceptable.

We can choose to use education as our weapon.  These new and sometimes old denizen of the Internet who do not know any better need to be taught what is acceptable and decent online. This is why I am writing this even as the matter is almost resolved. We need more people to know about the DOs and Don’ts online.

On January 1980, a paper “DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol” was prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Jon Postel wrote about the Robustness Principle.  If there is one core governing principle of Internet activity, of Internet ethics and netiquette and transmission then that would be it.  It goes like this: “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others“.  So when in doubt as to what the proper course is, be conservative. It is a good rule of thumb for anything to do with the Internet, would you agree?

The translation in Filipino is this: maging conserbatibo sa inyong kilos at gawain, ngunit maging liberal sa pagtanggap sa kilos at gawain ng ibang tao?*

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* thanks to Arctic Samurai for helping me with the translation.
** images are from screenshots I took.

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