In a recent interview with Salon, Rhodes defended himself against the charges from Patton Oswalt, Gawker's Jeb Lund and many others, saying that he plans to "be a lot more careful to make sure my tweets are clearly my own."

Continue Reading...

Professor Steve Joordens of the University of Toronto assigned more than 1,700 students the task of editing and improving two different Wikipedia articles on topics pertaining to the lectures he'd given.

The students dug in and amended the articles, but something fishy caught a site editor’s attention: Of the 1,700 students who'd been handed the assignment, an estimated 85 percent had plagiarized their edits.

Continue Reading...

Via the New York Times:

Last fall, the administrators searched the e-mails of 16 resident deans, trying to determine who had leaked an internal memo about how the deans should advise students who stood accused of cheating. But most of those deans were not told that their accounts had been searched until the past few days, after The Boston Globe, which first reported the searches, began to inquire about them.

Rather than the searches being kept secret from the resident deans, “they should’ve been asked openly,” said Richard Thomas, a professor of classics. “This is not a good outcome"... On his blog, which is closely followed by many people at Harvard, Dr. Lewis called the administration’s handling of the search “dishonorable,” and, like some of his colleagues, said the episode would prompt him to do less of his communication through his Harvard e-mail account, and more through a private account.

Continue Reading...

Williams blamed his researcher for this apparent plagiarism. He told Salon that he did not know that the "young man" did not summarize the report himself, and instead borrowed the language directly from CAP. According to that reasoning, the disputed sections of his column -- which were rewritten after CAP pointed out the similarities to D.C. newspaper The Hill -- must have simply been cut-and-pasted by Williams from his researcher and into the column that appeared under the highly paid commentator's name.

Continue Reading...

[embedtweet id="292304798999539712"]

[embedtweet id="292311288799981568"]

The "Glee" track, from Season 4, below:

Indeed, the song bears an uncanny resemblance to Coulton's 2005 release, posted on YouTube via user Enzemo:

Salon has reached out to Fox via email and is waiting to hear back.

Continue Reading...

When Beyoncé "was writing" Destiny's Child songs, she did so with help: There is not a single song on any of the group's four albums that Beyoncé wrote herself. She, more and more as the group's run went on, was involved in writing, but a more typical Destiny's Child song was their single "Lose My Breath," with seven credited writers. On the group's final album, several songs were credited to all three singers in the group. And songwriting credits are often arbitrary -- Beyoncé was disqualified before three much less notable writers from an Academy Award nomination for the "Dreamgirls" song "Listen," which she co-wrote.

Continue Reading...

Not so fast. I recently came into possession of a reprint of an old pamphlet, titled "An Author to be Lett," written by the English poet Richard Savage in 1729; its contents serve as a reminder that it was ever thus. The work purports to be a prospectus discovered in a "leathern case, which had once been red, but was grown black with Grease" that had been "accidentally drop'd near the Mews Gate," a London neighborhood known for its concentration of booksellers. The document's alleged author, one Iscariot Hackney, was meant to stand for the entire scribal community known as Grub Street, a conglomeration of down-at-heel, mercenary writers serving the thriving periodical press as well as a booming book trade. A "hackney" was a horse (eventually a cab) that could be hired by the hour, and in time writers operating on the same principle would become commonly known as hacks.

Continue Reading...

The major moral lesson to be taken from the Fareed Zakaria scandal is not what the media focused on this past week. Yes, he lifted material concerning the long, mostly unknown history of gun control, and he did so transparently. Even if he hadn’t been obliged to come up with an article for Time on a short deadline, he would still have taken more or less the same steps, and for a reason that, on the surface, makes perfect sense: The history he needed to tap into was too involved for someone trained as a journalist to investigate in depth.

Michael Barthel’s probing piece in Salon about transparency and credibility in the Internet age aims at the heart of the problem. But for professional historians, there’s more to it than the cut-and-paste freedom that the Web invites. Plagiarism is both a broader and touchier issue than most people imagine it to be – outright “copying.” It is ultimately a question of originality.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

These days, though, de Borchgrave is involved in some less praiseworthy pursuits. Alongside his other activities, the veteran newsman is a columnist for the Washington Times, the influential conservative broadsheet, where he once served as editor in chief. And in a handful of columns over the last year he has lifted passages verbatim, or nearly verbatim, from the Internet and other sources, without attribution — a fact the Washington Times' leadership tried to sweep under the rug, according to insiders at the paper.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Little, Brown recalled and pulped the book, issuing the mortified admission that they had "published a book that we can no longer stand behind." Rowan's nerviest steals, laid out in exhausting detail on Reluctant Habits, suggest he was unaware of the existence of Google. Of course he was going to be found out. So why did he do it?

Continue Reading...

The Telegraph accuses Hari of inventing an atrocity in the story that won him the Orwell Prize. Hari took a trip to the Central African Republic in 2007, where he documented a covert French war being waged in support of a brutal dictator.

One of the most shocking claims: French soldiers told Hari that while serving in Rwanda, they were ordered not to help children who came to them holding their parents' severed heads. But Hari's translator said no one ever told Hari this. Here's a section from an email she wrote to Hari in 2007:

Continue Reading...

The answer to this theoretical film query has been answered by none other than Michael Bay, whose auteur work can be boiled down to "big things blowing up or hitting other big things." But even with that not-too-original concept, Bay has gotten sloppy: allegedly taking direct shots from his 2005 flop "The Island" and putting them in "Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon."

Last week, a viral-video pirate named Jermain Odreman spent a considerable amount of time watching Bay's movies in slow-motion in order to catch almost identical sequences from both films. The footage is unquestionably similar, down to the type of car that flips over, the angle of the smoke from the explosion, and the damage done by flying shrapnel.

Continue Reading...

This quote-recycling (or inventing) is apparently a not-uncommon practice, Young says, though it's rare among the famous and successful:

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...