Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

So her response is “Sorry, Josh, I thought I was stealing from a friend, not you!”

It’s a good thing I’m not friends with this person, because I’d be seriously peeved to read my friend’s article and discover that she’d quoted me and not giving me credit for the line.

*head meets desk* (again and again and again)

And yes, I expect to hear the chorus of “are they flagging that poor dead horse again? who care?” any second now.

Now I’ll go back to hitting my head on the desk.

It’s gotten so trashy that its moved beyond a simple drinking game and has entered the realm of Walmart bingo… http://bitsandpieces.us/2008/10/29/wal-mart-bingo/

Sarah, are you going to blog about yours and Nora’s presentation? At least the salient points? Thanks,

This is a plagiarism drinking game I wrote a couple years ago for another plagiarism wank. You’re welcome to do whatever you like with it, Bitchery.

  1. Vehement denial of all wrongdoing: take a sip.
  2. Threatening the people who discovered/exposed the plagirism: take a sip
  3. Blaming the plagiarism on stress/mental illness/physical illness/past trauma/past life trauma: take three sips.
  4. Emergence of sock puppets in the guise of spouse/agent/sibling/therapist/dog groomer: take a sip.
  5. Threats of internet lawyers: take a sip.
  6. Appearance of internet lawyers: take a shot.
  7. Appearance of internet lawyer who has no understanding of copyright law/the First Amendment/basic rules of grammar: take two shots.
  8. Grudging admittance of wrongdoing and half-assed apology: take three shots.
  9. Acceptance of responsibility and sincere apologies to the offended party: CHUG LIKE A FRAT BOY ON SPRING BREAK.

While I find her actions utterly contemptible and firmly believe she should be publicly shamed at the very least, and fined/fired at most,  I gotta say that I’m skeptical anything will even be mentioned on a grand scale (tho I’d be thrilled to be wrong).  She’s too much of a darling of the liberal media, and the point she ‘stole’ is one that most in the media want to get behind.  So it will be mentioned by the ones who disagree with her anyway—Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity and company—but that’s about it. 

OTOH, if it had been Limbaugh or one of his kind who’d been caught that way, it would defintely be headline news.  I say that not to throw gas on the fire, but just to say that I think she’ll get cut considerably more slack than others would, due to her popularity and the position she was taking ... literally, as it turns out.

It shouldn’t be a matter of right/left politics, but of integrity.  I’m jaded and cynical enough to figure politics and popularity are pretty much all that will matter in this case.

Diane

I had the same thought as Becky. Her excuse is that she meant to steal from her friend, who presumably wouldn’t have complained, only to discover that the friend has stolen from Josh Marshall.  I guess we know what the two of them have in common—-lack of ethics.  And Maureen apparently also have no sense of irony since she plagiarized a column about accountability. I mean really, damn. 

I expect that this will generate a fair amount of heat in left blogisphere, if for no other reason than that MoDo is not popular.

oh my….

the stupid… it burns…. along with the insane.

My first thought can be summed up as WTF!!?!!

Followed by ‘dear Lord, I thought this was something that we wouldn’t have to worry about from professional journalists and commentators’.  I mean, this is their job, right?  To observe and investigate the world and describe things, comment on them, to put them into words for those who didn’t see it - and that’s what they get paid for, those words.  Right?  So why wouldn’t they be appallingly, rabidly possessive of those words, wanting those words to be their words, to consider this the hot-button of unforgivable sins?  (or is it only an unforgivable if someone takes their words, but just an ‘unfortunate accident’ if they have someone else’s words?)  Because isn’t that not only falsifying your work, like a sort of fraud, but stealing someone else’s work as well?

Of course, the next thing that comes to my mind is didn’t these people (any of the plagiarizing wretched bastards (not to besmirch the good names of their unfortunate mothers, who may be searching for adoption papers now…) who have been revealed for the cowardly thieving plagiarists that they are - didn’t they listen in school when their teachers said ‘using someone else’s words without telling us where you found them is called plagiarism, and it is a Bad Thing’  (I got that from… I know we covered that in 6th grade, I suspect we covered it in 5th grade.  We hit it again in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th (a very nit-picky English teacher that year), every college class that I had that wasn’t purely math (and it got covered in the Statistics class too)....  That can’t have been just my somewhat rural school system.  I’m certain that every other school system must have hit ‘plagiarism is bad - don’t do it’ in at least a few classes, and had it in the school rulebook/handbook (I can’t be the only person who actually read mine, can I?).

I mean, back the last time a plagiarism scandal hit this blog, my 7th grader could tell me what plagiarism was and that it was something bad that you should never do.  My 3rd grader didn’t know the word, but she knew the concept was wrong.  It can’t just be their school system.  These people had to know.  And everyone out there who wants to be any sort of writer - newspaper, blogger, short stories, novels, hell, even fanfic writers (the vast majority, at least) know that your work is your own, and is your hope of recognition, of longevity (some might say immortality) - you want it to be yours, and for nobody but nobody to steal it. 

so why…?  just… why?  I mean, the occasional fanfic plagiarism scandal I can almost explain away as there keep being stupid teenagers who are convinced that ‘nobody will find out, they won’t be able to catch me, I’ll get away with it (no, you won’t.  Someone will recognize it, and they will tell.  They might tell the real author first, or they might just put it out there for the fanfic community, God, and everybody to see and know that someone has become thieving swine… sometimes with emails.  That’s not the way most people want to get a reputation.)  It’s still a horrible, appalling thing.  But there will continue to be stupid teenagers.

..... but these are supposed to be grown-ups.  The same with the various novel plagiarism scandals that have been mentioned on this blog.  Presumed grown-ups, people who allegedly know what they’re doing and want to run their own lives, not needing a keeper to make sure they play nice and brush before bedtime.  So why do they do something like this?

(ummm… this is a bit of a hot-button for me.  Sorry to have ranted.)

verification word: dead54 - yep, I can think of 54 horrible torments and deaths for plagiarists.  Give me some time and paper and I can start a list. Of course, some of those things may be illegal…

She’s too much of a darling of the liberal media

I’m not even going to bother with the “liberal media” thing, but I feel like I have to point out that liberals don’t love her. The ones who love her are other pundits.  That’s a group that really sticks together.  They’re all making a lot of money from a job that has few qualifications and basically no accountability. They’ll all want this to go away quickly because if one of them falls off the gravy train they’re all at risk.  Bloggers aren’t going to feel the same way about it.

I mention this because I think authors might want to take note. When an author gets caught plagiarizing and other authors want to sweep it under the rug I always wonder if they’re doing it for the same sort of self-serving reason.  After going through a few of these scandals there are definitely writers that I wonder about, and I doubt that I’m the only one. So, taking the problem seriously really is in the best interest of every honest author.

I’m not even going to bother with the “liberal media” thing, but I feel like I have to point out that liberals don’t love her. The ones who love her are other pundits.  That’s a group that really sticks together.

Lori,

I guess I’m using the wrong terminology, then—those are the people I’m referring to.  I don’t follow a lot of blogs, other than this one and DA.  I do watch a lot of political commentary from various network/cable channels.  It’s those “talking heads’ and their various political expert panels who I’m referring to. I don’t know enough about blogs to comment on them.  And while I do know several liberals (normal people, not pundits) who absolutely adore MoDo, it’s quite possible I was assuming everyone adored her since the people around me do.

As I said, I wasn’t trying to make this a political thang, and I wasn’t using ‘liberal media’ as a perjorative term anyway—more of a descriptive statement,  since the majority of people in the media tend to be liberal. (And no, I can’t be bothered to prove it, tho I think it could be done.)

I would be thrilled if everyone gave this the outrage it deserves.  I’m just cynical enough to think they won’t. Time will tell, I suppose.

My point was simply that because the stolen statment refers to something that so many want to get behind, most might be less willing to have it brought to attention.  I am (ignorantly, since I don’t read them) assuming that because it is political, it will be more likely to be amplified by those who disagree and covered up by those who agree.  To me, the fact that it pertains to politics makes it more polarizing.

But it would be far from the first time for me to be wrong.  I hope the consequences are severe in ALL areas, from politics to romance to whatever else. 

Plagiarism should never be tolerated anywhere, any time, or for any reason.

Diane
sleep deprived and heading off now before I cause more problems

Oh dear.
Plagiarism is wrong. Period. (That’s what you say in your book anyway, so I’m just paraphrasing you back to you, not plagiarising you or anything.)

People who do the cut and paste and don’t attribute = Wrong. Plagiarism. Bad Karma.

Some people think there needs to be some kind of word limit before it becomes plagiarism. Like, I dunno, the first 100 words are a freebie or something.

Um. No.

If you copy someone else’s work (paragraphs, copyrighted characters, established worlds, theories etc) without attributing it, it’s plagiarism.

You may also be breaching someone’s copyright, which also adds to the mess.

Ideas on the other hand - go for it. Boy meets girl. Been done to death. Not a problem. Just an idea, so go ahead and use it. It’s what you do with an idea that makes it yours.

Yes, we are human. Everyone can make a mistake. There are times when I’m writing and I think ‘jeez, that was good. Hell, it’s too good. It can’t possibly be mine. Maybe I’ve channelled it from somewhere.’ So you know what I do? I copy and paste the line into google over there in the top searchy button spot in the corner and it takes all of five minutes to find out if it is mine, or I’ve channelled it from someone and not realised.

So now I’ve outed myself as paranoid, but I think this is a good thing. Perhaps the reason more authors don’t slam plagiarism is because the ‘I must have channelled it’ excuse hits a nerve and people think ‘gosh, maybe I’ve been a plagiarist and not realised, in which case, I’d better shut up and lay low because the screaming haters will come after me if I say anything’.

Or something to that effect.

But, come on people. (Again, not an original thought at all). Stop copying other people. Please. Stop it.

Lord. Here we go again.

You know what I think is behind this? A decided lack of respect for bloggers as, you know, actual writers. Dowd would almost certainly not have stolen from a writer published in a traditional medium. But bloggers look like fair game. (They’re not, of course, but that’s beside the point.)

(And FWIW, as a liberal who hates Maureen Dowd in a “get off my side—you’re making it look bad” kind of way, I admit to a rather unholy glee at this.)

For every plagiarism scandal, there follows a flurry of discussion of the excuses. Is the excuse a valid one? Is it a lie? Is it simply a lame excuse.

The thing I love about copyright law is that excuses do not matter. There is no intent requirement in the law and most excuses go to intent.

Dowd’s excuse is different because it really goes to access. She is saying that she did not read the blog. To prove copyright infringement you need to show two things—access and substantial similarity. No question that there is substantial similarity in this case, but Dowd is saying she had no access.

At least she had no direct access. She had this friend who suggested she include this point in her column. Personally, I don’t think it is stealing to take a suggestion from a friend in this context. I do it all the time when I’m brainstorming with friends about my fiction. I even use specific wording that my friends suggest when they are critiquing my work. They also use my suggestions. There is no expectation of credit being given or anything of the sort. The suggestion is given to be used and the author may use it or not.

I think Dowd is claiming the suggestion was made in this spirit by her friend. The problem here of course, is that the suggestion was not original to her friend. It wasn’t her friend’s original work to give. The friend in fact read the blog and passed along this line from the blog. So—what we end up with is Dowd actually having access to the blog she didn’t read.

Even though she didn’t read it, she did hear the line through her friend. That is access. In reading the full account of Dowd’s apology, I think she admits that as well. She says that she should have credited the original author. That credit has been added to the web version of the article and an apology and credit will be included in the print version as well.

This satisfies my sense of justice. I feel Dowd has owned up to her mistake and by giving credit is making it clear the work isn’t hers. Should there be some sort of payment? That is really up to the parties to work out. What was the value of that one sentence to that issue of the Times? In what way has the blogger been damaged? Are we all just upset because Dowd hasn’t been humiliated enough?

Of course plagiarism is wrong and it must be taken seriously. But tarring and feathering doesn’t seem necessary. Not in a situation where the plagiarist admits she is wrong and corrects the error.

Adding another chance to guzzle in the drinking game stated above:
Dowd can take the path of Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle and call it laziness, resign and get a high paying job on tv.

I do wonder how much coverage this SNAFU will really get, sadly I predict your last reaction “this isn’t the issue we need to talk about and it’s not important,” mostly because, as snarkhunter and others may have mentioned she copied “just a blogger.”

It seems to me that bloggers are the ones with the MOST original opinions and the media/hollywood/etc are the ones recycling everything.

The ones who love her are other pundits.  That’s a group that really sticks together.

I think the terms you gals are looking for are Old Media vs New Media. Irrespective of political affiliations or left-right leanings, those refer to the differences in usage of the Internet technologies available today. Old media are generally the previously established newspapers, TV networks and wire services while new media are the bloggers, social networking and other purely Internet based newcomers.

The distinction and impact on this discussion is that many from the Old Media has a tendency even with their online articles to be resistant to linking to sources - especially if those sources are from the upstart New Media who many times are scooping them on the stories nowadays. In contrast the New Media might have a tendency to overlink at times but that’s the very nature of the beast.

Doesn’t mean that those in New Media can’t and don’t plagarize but it does mean that the tendency against not linking in Old Media is definitely part of the mindset behind the problem here. To call something like this plagarism means they’d have to start doing something they don’t want to do in the first place - acknowledge the existence of something they’re trying to ignore by actually linking to it. Hence the “my friend told me” instead of “I read it myself” bit. It’s sort of link a gossip inference. I didn’t actually hear it so I can’t tell you were it came from - alas no link.

Bull. But very common in Old Media.

Now, that doesn’t mean they’re all that way. Those that want to survive are slowly coming around and beginning to adapt and it’s very easy to see which ones. For one thing, some still have strong journalistic standards in place to begin with about this type of thing. For another, they’re using linking more aggressively even to, gasp, bloggers and other New Media things on the Internet when there is a reason to.

In other words, they’ve realized they can’t afford not to. It’s just that some of them haven’t gotten there yet.

I’m sticking my two cents in here, because a lot of the outrage expressed shows a lack of knowledge of what writers do.

Writers are never wholly original.  There aren’t that many original thoughts out there.

It also doesn’t happen in a vacuum and borrowing from a friend is not unethical.  When my friends come out with witty and beautiful lines I *usually* laugh and tell them, “I’m going to steal that.”  And they let me.  Most of them aren’t writers and aren’t going to use it again.  They are happy to let their good lines live on in my work.  Those that are writers already know, since they’ve stolen lines off of me.

This back and forth is constant between writing and discussing and rewriting based on things friends said, and I understand why Dowd would not want to name the friend in question.

As for the commas, they are around the dependent clause.  Where else should they go?

So I find her explanation plausible.  Whether or not that is what really happened, no one but Dowd and her “friend” knows.  But it’s entirely plausible.

@Diane; I’m sorry that I misunderstood. I have sort of a knee-jerk reaction to the term “liberal media” and I should have controlled that better. The plagiarism thing made me cranky and I hadn’t had enough sleep either and somewhere in there I lost the ability to be appropriately civil.

@Leigh Anne—I think you raise some valid points.  Quoting a friend isn’t necessarily plagiarism or unethical, and all of life can be grist for the writer’s mill.  When I went back and read the two quotes side-by-side though, it struck me as odd that the phrasing and sentence structure would have been exactly the same, except for one or two changed words.

If nothing else it should be a wake-up call to all of us to be more careful about our writing, and to give proper attribution when it’s called for.

Oy. Ditto to all of the above.

It’s difficult for me to believe that the friend used all the same words in the same order as the TPM piece in her conversation. Same words, same order—which would be a quote. And a fairly long quote to toss into a conversation without saying: Like I read in TPM.

It’s difficult for me to believe that Dowd used the same words in the same order as her friend in a conversation, unless that conversation included note-taking. And even then, it’s difficult for me to understand why a journalist would use someone’s exact words in the exact order as if they were her own.

I’ve already read several comments on other sites that boil down to: We have more important things to talk about! She couldn’t have done it because she’s too experienced. Torture is the point, so really, by doing this she’s given the torture debate more exposure.

Excuses, justifications, rationalizations. As usual.

Thank you for raising this issue again and again—it makes me go back to rethink stories in my own life that were irritating but now make my blood boil. Case in point. There’s a travel writer in my home town. Back in the day, she and all the other mums would sit around and chit chat while our kids swam at swim meets—believe me, that’s a lot of time. Now this tale is 2nd, maybe 3rd hand but one of the mums is/was an incredible traveller—Thailand, Russia, you name it and she organized everything beautifully in advance, got the most out of the trip yadda yadda. And wrote fascinating, beautiful, information letters about them. Yep, I’m sure you can see where this story is going: her account lifted kit and kaboodle into the traveler writer’s latest book (back them). Years have passed, I’m not sure if I could even figure out what country or what book but the point remains. It has always bugged the hell out of me and I daresay it’s WAY more common than we suspect.

As for Miz Dowd, come on, a full sentence with one word changed—my only question now is how HOT google is going to be today with everyone running her every last column through the meat grinder. I doubt very much that this is the one and only time it’s happened. But then that’s me, a realistic cynic.

I don’t think anyone expected Dowd to name her friend. And of course people pick up ideas in conversation.  However, I think there’s a big difference between saying something like, “I was talking to a friend the other day and we had this conversation” and “Here’s my great idea.”

There’s also a big difference between working on a typewriter and working at a computer on the Internet - or, heck, an office intranet - nowadays where it only takes a couple of clicks to link to the source in question. Instant source and attribution - especially when one is talking about another website as the source.

See, this is where the problem comes in with regards to the disconnect between Old and New because one of their arguments will invariably be - oh, but it was published in newspaper so linking isn’t an issue—

Like they aren’t composing it on a computer originally? Like it doen’t also go out on the web?

They try to make it sound like they’re still pre-Internet when everyone knows they’re not.

So now it’s “my friend made me do it” ?  Okay.

I was waiting because I knew someone would post about the old/new connection: 

The myth of the parasitical bloggers

I’m not sure I agree with him about the ethics involved but he definitely captures problems regarding the flow of information back and forth.

I’m sticking my two cents in here, because a lot of the outrage expressed shows a lack of knowledge of what writers do.

Writers are never wholly original.  There aren’t that many original thoughts out there.

...you say this on a blog owned and frequented by writers? Seriously?

I have no problem with Dowd borrowing her friend’s words, assuming that the friend was aware of and willing to have her words borrowed. Of course, the problem here is that Dowd didn’t borrow her friend’s words. Her friend—if said person exists—stole someone else’s words, passed them off as his/her own, and then Dowd borrowed them.

Nobody is wholly original, but there’s coincidence and then there’s this.

~I’m sticking my two cents in here, because a lot of the outrage expressed shows a lack of knowledge of what writers do.~

I’ve got a pretty decent handle on what writers do. I also suspect Sarah, as a long-time and successful blogger who’s co-authored a book has one, too.

Brainstorming with pals, or flipping off lines—using the I’m using that one—isn’t at all the same as reporting or commentating using someone else’s words, structure, voice as if it came from you. It simply isn’t the same.

And while there may not be that many original ideas—thought we could debate that, too—I certainly believe there’s plenty of ways to express those ideas, to articulate them, to structure them.

Josh Marshall wrote: More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Rephrasing that while making the same point—a good point—just isn’t that hard:

Many ask if torture was approved in an attempt to prevent terrorist attacks and save American lives, why the emerging timeline indicates these methods were utilized during the period the Bush administration sought political muscle to justify invading Iraq.

I’m not a political commentator, so I’m sure this could be articulated more cleanly, and with more punch. But it only took me a minute.

Update on the reporting of Dowd’s “faux pas”... Fox News covered, as predicted, stating that all but three words were exactly the same. Coincidence? Only if she was sharing his brain! Fox didn’t dwell on it beyond saying Dowd had issued an excuse…er…statement.

spam word: cent77 Yeah, I’ll put my 77 cents worth in to this debate!

Nora, I <3 you for your willingness to stick to your guns!

Language Log takes her to the cleaners.  “As a college professor, I’ve heard many excuses for plagiarism over the years, but I don’t believe that I’ve ever heard one quite that lame.”  With withering detail…

For clarification:

My previous comment was directed towards the statements saying Dowd using her friend’s line (had it truly been original to the friend) was unethical and that a writer getting ideas from anywhere other than her own brilliantly original brain in a complete vacuum was wrong.  As has been pointed out to me several times now, there is a difference, and I wanted to clarify that difference for those who expressed anger at the idea a writer’s work may not be entirely original all the time, rather than anger at the plagiarism itself.

I said her explanation was plausible.  I’m not picking at pieces of wording to decide whether or not she could have recreated it that closely second-hand.  I’m not saying the readers shouldn’t be outraged at the plagiarism (intended or not).  I haven’t stated my opinion on Dowd’s case one way or the other. 

Yes, Nora, I believe both you and Sarah understand what writer’s do.

So the situation made the front page of Yahoo news, but the headline made me bang my head on the desk again.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090518/ap_on_re_us/us_times_dowd

“NY Times columnist admits using blogger’s words”

“Using blogger’s words” Yeah, there’s a name for that. Oy.

theory37: Yes, it seems like there are at least 37 theories about why people plagiarize.

What I don’t get are the people who think because she’s a journalist, she couldn’t possibly have plagerized! I mean, I’m pretty naive, but just because someone is published, doesn’t mean doo doo about their ethics. I just don’t get this mindset AT ALL.

What I don’t understand about all of this is how seemingly intelligent people don’t get that if they can find things on the Internet, everyone else can find them too. That people who are interested in the same topics are all reading the same blogs and source material in the first place. It doesn’t take “googling” to be found out nowadays.

Then again, maybe that’s why there is an old media and a new media. Some people haven’t figured it out yet.

That’s too identical to the believable result of a friend’s comment in a phone conversation during her writing process.

I don’t know exactly where I saw it because I’ve seen so many articles on this today but one of them speculated that it was possible the passage was passed in a “text” type conversation, maybe IMing or something along that lines. Which could conceiveably make her honest but still guilty of using directly lifted material. Knowingly or knowingly, does it really matter?

To me it’s the mindset that’s developed that one person’s thoughts and words are worth less than another’s and can simply be lifted without acknowledgement of any kind. And, like Sarah said, sure she apologized but of what worth is that apology? What is essentially being said is that if no one had caught it, it wouldn’t have mattered because my friend gave it to me - I didn’t get it from that source you’re all talking about. That’s about as backhanded as one can get.

Uh, that should be “knowingly or unknowingly”
Sheesh.  ;)

I’m an author. I’m also a blogger. I ALWAYS attribute if I am excerpting someone else’s comments from another blog or a news article or posting a photo, and there is a four-paragraph “fair use” rule as well. It is the right thing to do. Period.

I can’t believe Maureen Dowd thought she wouldn’t get caught. First of all, it’s wrong. Secondly, does she have any idea how many people read TPM daily?

Thirdly, I am Josh Marshall’s fangirl. The guy’s incredible.

-S

I don’t know exactly where I saw it because I’ve seen so many articles on this today

But you know that you didn’t think it up. If only everyone could keep that simple concept clear we wouldn’t keep having these incidents.

But oh, Lordy, hell hath no kerfuffle like the seething torment of a left-wing or right-wing political blog.

Bwahahahaha. Thanks for that.

You’re right, we’ve been down this road before, here, but I’ll say it again: is it so bleeding hard to just NOTE YOUR DAMN SOURCES AND USE SOME QUOTATION MARKS?? That’s all it takes, people! And, shit, I do better research than that for my blog, and I don’t even get PAID.

But you know that you didn’t think it up. If only everyone could keep that simple concept clear we wouldn’t keep having these incidents.

Actually, while I understand what you’re saying, Lori, I tend to lean towards this being more about the ongoing battle between the new/old medias than simply about attribution.

Why? Because while you’re exactly right that I know I didn’t think it up even though I can’t remember where I found it, I also know and respect the technology enough to recognize that I could probably find the source within a relatively few clicks of the mouse if the need truly arose.

But, and here’s the important point, it doesn’t matter to me what that source might be. It does matter to them, though.

This isn’t about politics or viewpoints or agreeing or disagreeing, either. There is a mindset that’s been around for awhile on the Internet for a long time which seems to be totall ingrained in the old media which can be summed up one word - money. People have long equated linking with losing visitor hits to other sites. Which is absolutely and utterly ridiculous because it’s totally counter to the meaning and purpose the Internet but there it is.

Simple, basic rule, the site that links the most is the site that leads the way so visitors come back for more information, which is why we now have a new media replacing the old one that just doesn’t get it.

But it’s also why this is about a resistance to linking to the sources they don’t even want to acknowledge as it is simple attribution of a source. How can they quote something from elsewhere from the web if they don’t acknowledge those places in the first place? As if only parts of the web exist and others don’t?

It’s not unlike the blindness and ignorance that goes on about romance novels.

Oh, and when I say it’s about money, I don’t mean that their approach is working for them, either. What I mean is that that’s the way it’s always been done so that’s the way they’re doing it even though it’s a new media.

Hence the terms.

*headdesk*  My students will be wanting to discuss this in class this week, I can see it now.  They had a field day with the journalists using Wikipedia fuss last week!  And while I am always glad for a chance to prove that what we learn in the classroom really does have real world applications, these cases always disappoint me.

Everyone should know better.  No one should get away with it.  Let’s keep banging that drum, my friends.

The headline over at Galley Cat is “NY Times Absolves Maureen Dowd”.  Nothing further needs to be done, apparently.

I don’t know—is that NYT’s job?  Have they actually investigated anything?  Done anything other than give Dowd a pass?

Yes,  SonomaLass, exactly. From that article:

Fitzgerald was shocked by the result of his experiment.

“I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about,” he said.

More and more, though, people are realizing that in fact the reverse is more the truth. The very nature of blogging in terms of just how many there are out there looking over everyone else’s shoulder tends to provide a check and double-check on the flow of information. Is it perfect? No, but it’s a damn sight more perfect than nobody even looking or checking anything at all. Which appears to be the morass the old media, mainstream or so-called quailty publications are falling into.

And they wonder why they’re losing readerships.

I think part of the discussion about this should be scale. People will dismiss this as oh, she only lifted a paragraph or a line and she appologized, it’s over now. However, if we allow a paragraph, what about a chapter? What about half a book.
I’m glad Ms Dowd has corrected her site and has given credit but why not have done so in the first place? IMHO, she should have wanted to attribute the comment to the original author, b/c then she could have generated some traffic to the original author’s site. It would have done him good. Granted, she’s done the same thing by being caught, however, the intention was not there.

Here is the letter I sent to the editor of The New York Times:

As a teacher and a loyal reader of your paper, I must write to ask that you in some way discipline Maureen Dowd.  Like an athlete who fails a drug test, she has been caught cheating, and she should face some penalty.  An apology (on Huffington Post, sort of) and a correction are inadequate, because she didn’t “make a mistake,” she cheated.  She violated ethical rules that I work very hard to instill in my students—cite your sources, indicate direct quotes and attribute them, and don’t steal another writer’s language.  How can I tell them these are real world rules if one of the world’s most respected newspapers allows its columnist to break them without consequence?  Let’s be at least as strict with our writers and thinkers as we are with out professional athletes, and exact a penalty that shows that we take our ethical stances seriously.

Isn’t there some equivalent to a 50-game suspension for a columnist???

Just wanted to pop in and say there was a piece by Ed Pilkington in the UK’s Guardian newspaper this morning under the headline: “US columnist Maureen Dowd caught up in plagiarism row.”

Now, I have no clue who Ms Dowd is, but the piece was not too complementary, painting her excuses as implausible at best and pointing out that “if a columnist is to borrow a paragraph uncredited, at least they should ensure it doesn’t belong to Josh Marshall.” Pilkington lastly points out that Dowd was the one to ruin Joe Biden’s 1988 bid for the Presidency when she broke the story that he had been nicking his speeches from the then Labour leader in Britain Neil Kinnock. Quelle irony, eh?

We in the UK are currently mired in a major public out-cry about our MPs expenses claims - which have finally been published due to Freedom of Information legislation. Turns out our not-so-honourable parliamentarians have been getting the general public to pay for everything from their cat food to the maintenance on their swimming pools and even cleaning out their moats (yeah, that’s right, a moat!!). So if I hear one more person use the ‘I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, so therefore I didn’t do anything wrong’ defense I think I’ll reach for my sick bag.

Personally, I’m with Nora on this (ooh, I’ve always wanted to say that). Dowd’s defence is completely implausible it would require her friend to quote Marshall verbatim without mentioning it to her and then for Dowd to write it down verbatim too during what was supposed to be a casual chat when she was just brainstorming ideas for her column. Um, I don’t think so. But even if Dowd’s excuse were true, and by some fluke she plagiarised third hand without realising it, it’s still plagiarism - and for her to have any credibility at all surely she should acknowledge it as such.

I don’t have the tune ti read all of the comments, so I’ll come back later after I have finished my paper (that I promise I won’t plagiarise) to read them.  I just needed to comment that it is not all that surprising that students don’t think of plagiarising as being illegal or even bad when most of the time it is ignored or covered up like this.  It really is such a sad state of affairs when a NYT columnist is guilty of plagiarism.

That whole “liberal media” crap is, well, crap.  Who pointed out that Dowd had plagerized?  Well, a DFH “liberal” from TPM.  And if you’ve visited DailyKos, you can see that they were all over this.  Maureen Dowd is NOT a liberal, and the idea that there is a “liberal media” is ridiculous.

I hope she figuratively burns in flames for this.  But I doubt it.  The right-leaning “corporate media” that controls a majority of our media all stick up and cover for themselves.

Oh, dear gods.  Some tool on Huffingtonpost (and several of his commenters) don’t seem to even understand what plagiarism is.

It’s not the idea that she stole.  It’s the words.  The exact freaking words, down to the punctuation.  You don’t own the concept, you own your materialization of the concept.

Dumb.  People are dumb.  Grrrrrrrr.

I’d like to add one point to my prior post and clarify what I have already said.

First, I’d like to applaud the authors of SBTB for bringing so many instances of plagiarism to our attention. By calling attention to the problem SBTB helps to educate authors and makes it harder to get away with copying. This is a real public service.

Now the clarification. The point I was trying to make is that copying is never innocent. Unfortunately, what I often see when there is a plagiarism scandal is that the discussion becomes one of dissecting the excuse. The excuse is almost always an explanation of how the copying occurred or wasn’t really copying and we spend a lot of energy talking about whether that explanation is true or not as though having a good story would somehow excuse the copying.

Under copyright law, intent is not an issue. Some would argue that intent is an issue in plagiarism (see, for example, the RWA Code of ethics which makes intentional copying a violation while remaining silent on inadvertent copying). My personal opinion is that it shouldn’t matter why or how the copying occurred. Copying—or passing off another author’s work as your own—is wrong. Period.

Why then am I satisfied that justice is served in Dowd’s case? Forget whether you believe the friend story or not. What was the result? Dowd admitted that the words were not her own. She credited the original author of the words and made appropriate changes in the piece online and a printed correction with the proper credit in the print version. In my opinion this sets things right. The original author is getting credit for his words and Dowd has admitted the copying.  We can argue til the cows come home about whether her apology was sufficient or whether she is being honest. I just don’t think that matters.

In an appropriate case, it would also make sense to pay damages for harm caused, or lost profits from the use of the intellectual property. In this case I’m not seeing monetary damages and I can think of no further punishment or consequences to Dowd or the NYT that would be helpful. There is an element of public humiliation to Dowd and the Times because Dowd was caught. As I said at the beginning the public revelation of the copying is a public service. Humiliation is an appropriate consequence. It should make all authors more careful to check their work and avoid intentional as well as careless copying. Not only is it the morally right thing to do, but we must be aware that the consequences could include the public humiliation of being caught.

Why is humiliation and public scorn the answer? Or should I say, why is that enough? Can I jump on the bandwagon of the poster who brought up the example of professional sports figures?

Why isn’t she being suspended without pay? Made to produce a blog proclaiming the ins and outs of what she did wrong? “Oh public censure is enough” ... paraphrasing. Losing buckeroos speaks volumes too! Especially since she was all over Biden with her Sex in the City style hobnail boots.

Hear, hear, Janet W!  While I agree w/Teresa that the “outing” is important, I don’t think the shame (if there really is any) is an adequate response, any more than Manny Ramirez being on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline “Caught Taking Illegal Substances” would be adequate.  Some suspension, some loss of income, is called for when a professional violates the rules of her or his profession.

Otherwise, it’s as Liz said:

it is not all that surprising that students don’t think of plagiarising as being illegal or even bad when most of the time it is ignored or covered up like this.

When a student in my class plagiarizes, he or she gets busted.  It affects his or her grade, because it matters.  I will continue to be a hard-ass about this, but it sure would be nice if writing and publishing professionals were more so.  Many are, of course (thank you Nora!  I quote you in my classes!), but so far not The New York Times.

There needs to be a big enough penalty that people will see it as serious.  Probably a statutory penalty rather than suing for punitive damages.

Trava said:

There needs to be a big enough penalty that people will see it as serious.  Probably a statutory penalty rather than suing for punitive damages.

There is a statutory penalty under the Copyright Act. Unfortunately, it applies only when the work is registered with the Copyright office. So—had Dowd copied a line from a book registered with the Copyright Office, the author could sue for statutory damages. Attorney fees are also provided, so it would be possible to get an attorney to take the case even though little money is at stake.

However, my assumption is that most blog articles are not registered with the copyright office. I’d have to look at the statute to find out if it is possible at this point for him to register this article, sue and get damages.

In any case—to have some sort of legal penalty applied we are talking about a court process. There are no Copyright police who can issue a ticket and collect a fine. This is why the idea of penalizing someone seems impractical to me in this situation. I’m a lawyer—I can’t help it. I like process. I don’t like the idea of a presumption that every instance of alleged copying automatically means fines, suspension from jobs or casting out of the publishing world.

BTW, I do think that some instances of copying should require all of those things after the copying is proven in court or has been admitted. I’m appalled to see writers who have been proven guilty of repeatedly copying and who continue to have their books published on a regular basis.

@Ebony, re: your remark about inadvertent memory providing you with phrases. It shouldn’t have passed uncommented upon, IMO, but apparently I’m the first to say: good on ya for going the distance. I’ve wondered about this, too, since I read so much and have done since I was knee-high. Whose brilliant prose did I take so far into my mind that I think it’s mine now? You’ve taken it one step further, and appropriately so. I will now plagiarize (?) your method and take it upon myself to do the same when my prose looks too brilliant to be mine alone.

Also, in the OP there was a question: why isn’t there more attention paid in the larger publishing world? I keep expecting this also, naif that I am.  But I still see Cassie Edwards’ novels out there, so that publisher is not taking it seriously enough.

Ebony, you have now increased my personal pantheon of writing savants to 10 names.

Nothing to investigate, nothing to raise an outcry over.  Modo has a horde of interns/assistants preparing column material for her and pulled something off TPM written by Josh Marshall and the final product did not get attributed.  Somebody plagiarized him and Modo wasn’t paying attention.  A sharp-eyed TPM blogger caught it and emailed them, and Modo corrected it by adding an attribution.  It was fair use, if attributed, but it hadn’t been attributed.

Plagiarism is not fair use.  Since Josh Marshall has issued a statement that the correction was prompt and he is satisfied, then why aren’t the rest of you satisfied?  This is not the Carrie Edwards situation where she plagiarized works of non-fiction and fiction, unattributed, going back decades.  This was a single sentence paragraph, promptly attributed the following day.

If you want to help stamp out plagiarism, it would help to make the proper distinctions and put things in perspective.

That having been said, if the alert TPM’ers find two, three, four more examples of exactly the same thing in past columns by MoDo or anyone else writing op-eds a the NYT, then it’s a problem of a different magnitude.  But in this case it’s firmly in the “error” category.

Right out of Star Wars (paraphrasing) ... “Nothing to see here folks, move along” ... gee, so now it’s “MoDo has an arsenal of assistants and they f’ck’ed up” ... that’s what you’re saying? It’s gross, imo, whatever direction it moves in (friend on the phone, out of the ether yadda yadda)—because, call me naive, it’s her name but it’s not her words? I have no problem with assistants/editors/whomevers providing topic ideas, talking points, research help but somehow you’re saying a clear and comprehensive apology wipes her slate clean for lifting someone else’s words? Passing them off as her own? Yeah she took responsibility but this spin on how it’s no biggie. Hmmmm.

It’s the lack of consequences that is annoying me and being told that this is a non-story is even more annoying. You’re saying, “if it’s a pattern, then it’s time to be concerned” (again, paraphrasing) ... excuse me, but isn’t that up to the public, that great unwashed, no one ever went broke underestimating them public that we’re talking about?

Bottom line, if it had been a commentator who wasn’t quite as popular or heaven forfend, a politician, would you be suggesting we just let this story die?

@Janet W: I think you missed my point.  Copyright is a limited monopoly right granted (in the US) by the Constitution.  Plagiarism is a breach of that right, and it is in essence, a breach of contract.  As with other breaches of contract, there are remedies available.  In this case, the breach (not attributing a quote) was remedied to the satisfaction of the author by attributing the quote.  That is all the author felt was necessary and to HIM, there is no more issue.  Since he is the only injured party here, yes, the issue does go away.  Unless, as I say, there are other instances.  You can bet that other dedicated readers at TPM blog (of which I am one) are presently looking for other instances.

Does this mean I don’t think plagiarism is wrong? No. It means in this case, it was easily and promptly remedied.  Does it give MoDo a black eye? Sure.  Read the Guardian.  Read bloggers swarming all over TPM calling her a cheat.  No consequences? Not hardly.  It is very likely she’ll be known as “The Times Plagiarist” from now until doomsday.  Her Pulitzer has gotten some tarnish on it.  But no, the law does not require further consequences than the prompt attribution and apology, and neither does the injured party.  So - why should anyone else?  It is not, ultimately, our business.  It’s the business of the NYT and anyone their employees quote without attribution.

That having been said, if the alert TPM’ers find two, three, four more examples of exactly the same thing in past columns by MoDo or anyone else writing op-eds a the NYT, then it’s a problem of a different magnitude.  But in this case it’s firmly in the “error” category.

Talk about tossing down the gauntlet. Sigh. See what I mean about the mindset and cluelessness involved here? Does anyone honestly believe most people suspected that you gals would find as many “problems” within the Edwards books before you found them using technology now available?

@BevBB -  it’s the limits of fair use.  Dowd used a sentence without attribution, and with proper attribution it’s fair use, which is why she was compelled to correct it.  To the satisfaction of the original author (that is also important.)  The difference between this and the Carrie Edwards thing is that EVEN IF ATTRIBUTED, it was excessive use of copyrighted material and could not be used regardless.  Edwards could not have corrected it because she had borrowed too much.  And if you think that is hair-splitting, those are the hairs on which copyright cases are made or broken every day.  There is a fair-use right to quote others in newspapers - she erred in not attributing the quote, she corrected it - which is all that the law and the injured party required.

There is a fair-use right to quote others in newspapers - she erred in not attributing the quote, she corrected it - which is all that the law and the injured party required.

Okay, accepting that everything you say is correct, then answer this because I honestly haven’t gone back to check the NYT site - when they made the correction, did they actually link to the blog post or simply reference it in text?

Because I’m sort confused on how naming a blog/site but not actually linking to the specific url for the post/article is proper attribution of the source.

Of course, if they have included links, then I’m with you. Absolutely.

This is actually a very interesting topic for me because I just failed a student for the semester because she plagiarized not one but twice!  The first instance she failed the assignment and received a warning, and the second instance resulted in an automatic failure for the course.  Now, to be fair, I have noticed a rather disturbing trend where students do no know the difference between plagiarism and paraphrase.  Many of my students think they have written something “in their own words” when all they have done is substitute and rearrange.  So, I usually have to have a lesson or two in my Composition courses on paraphrasing and citation.  However, in this case, the student knew exactly what she did, and the complete apathy she expressed worries me for the future in that she seemed more miffed that she was caught than that what she did was a serious breach of my college’s honor code as well as a basic, human ethical code.  And, “my friend screwed me over” reflects a similar apathy and unwillingness to admit wrongdoing.  Just because you have a “good” reputation does not mean that we have to believe everything you say or that we cannot check up on you - no one is above the law. 

Indeed, I always tell my students:  How would you like it if someone stole your essay, submitted it to a scholarship committee, and is now enjoying a full ride to Harvard or Yale - all thanks to you?  Meanwhile, you are here, at a state college - albeit receiving a good, but certainly not ivy league, education - with a full time job, a full course load and ever mounting debt?  I watch them squirm uncomfortably for a time, and then I tell them that plagiarism is never free.  It always costs somebody, somewhere something, and with technology being what it is today, you will get caught. You will have to pay.  And it is nobody’s fault but your own.

@BevBB:

The text was corrected to read:

Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

In addition, an appended note was added to the op-ed:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Marshall writes:

I generally think we’re too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism. I haven’t said anything about this because I really didn’t think I had anything to add. Whatever the mechanics of how it happened, I never thought it was intentional. Dowd and the Times quickly corrected it, which I appreciated. And for me, that’s pretty much the end of it.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/05/very_briefly_on_dowd.php

Why is this story bringing out the cliche in me? The more I read that Marshall is cool, move on, she apologized and corrected, move on, the more my hackles start to rise. I read yesterday as I was blog crawling that drunk drivers, before they’re finally pulled over, have literally driven tipsy a gazillion times. Nice analogy. Or the guy saying to a gal (or let’s be PC), the gal saying to the guy, Would you sleep with me for a $1M? Sure he/she says. How about $1,000? What do you think I am?

I liked the story from the prof—in fact, I wish Smart Bitches would find that plagiarism quiz that was floating around at the heyday of Cassie Edwards: it is not easy to know the rules but hey, you are a columnist at the top of your game, you should know (or your assistant(s) should.

@Teresa:

The statutory penalty for infringement of copyright is actually quite steep, $100,000 per incident.  But besides needing to have a registered copyright, the injured party (the copyright holder) has to actually sue.  It is a civil, not a criminal, matter and not automatic.  It is expensive since it is a highly-specialized area of law, and there are four applicable standards that need to be applied in order to win a copyright infringement case, not all of which are cut and dried.  One of these is the demonstration of financial damage by the infringing party.

So, is that a “proper” attribution or not?

Notice I’m not saying it was plagarism. I’m just asking about how it was attributed even after it was corrected.

What I’m getting at is this - people would still have to search for the specific post when a link would take them directly to it. Heck, they’d have to search for his blog first. There is no extra information there to aid in that search if they were curious. So, I am curious if this is seen as truly proper by the literary types here. Seeing as how this is a new medium and all, what are the rules that should be followed? What do you teach your students?

@BevBB:

To my knowledge, the NYT online never embeds URL links in its op ed columns, so citing the full name of the blogger and the full name of his blog would cover just about everything.  And she attributed him in the same way as other attributions she has made over time.  That’s all I know.

@Louise van Hine:

As far as I’ve seen and heard, quite a few of the major print publications not to mention video networks that now have online sites don’t either, which why I’m asking the academics if it’s considered proper.

This isn’t idle curiosity. Just because that’s the way things have always been done doesn’t mean that’s the way they should always be done when one is dealing with new technology. Even respected dinosaurs have to adjust or they become extinct. So, yeah, I am curious. What rules are being taught about linking and attribution with the advent of this new media and technology?

I’m puzzled as to why people keep bringing up copyright violation—whether or not anyone’s copyright was violated *isn’t the point*. 

I could take an obscure late 18th century gothic novel and lift entire pages of it wholesale for a historical romance novel and it would violate no copyright whatsoever, because the work I would be copying from would be public domain.  It would, however, still be plagarism.  And it would be just as wrong as doing the same thing to a currently under copyright book.

Plagarism has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with lying and fraud—the crime isn’t the copying of the words themselves, but the passing off of another’s work off as your own.  You could violate copyright left, right, and center and completely avoid plagarism so long as you stuck quotation marks around the borrowed text and clearly stated that it was written by author X and not by you.  Someone can commit both copyright violation and plagarism at the same time, but they’re *not the same thing*.

Copyright violation is only an offence against the copyright holder.  Plagarism is an offense not only against the original author, but against every reader to whom the plagarist is misrepresenting themselves, and every other writer who actually does their own work and doesn’t cheat, the same way that a student submitting a term paper they got off the internet is an offense against both the teacher and the rest of the class.

@Elspeth:

The reason why I associated plagiarism with copyright law is because outside of the application of copyright law, plagiarism only has consequences within academic communities, i.e. students, and, though it is not often brought up, academicians writing and publishing articles.  The consequences of plagiarism in these environments is generally academic failure, as the professor above pointed out.

Otherwise, the only “consequences” for plagiarism are those meted out in civil copyright cases, or by the ethics standards of employers who catch their employees plagiarizing, which is purely a personal matter.

As frustrating as it might seem, there is actually no law against plagiarism, except as defined within copyright law.

No, there is no law against plagiarism, which is why I believe the writing/publishing profession should police itself more carefully.  There should be clear ethical rules, and those who violate those rules should pay a price.  I stand by my analogy regarding professional athletes:  taking hCG isn’t against the law either, but it IS against the rules of major league baseball, so getting caught means getting a penalty.

Even my students don’t get away with simply correcting an “attribution error”—they lose points on the assignment, and if there’s a pattern, the penalties get more severe. Sometimes they really don’t understand the rules, but they still have to play by them.  Ms Dowd SHOULD know the rules, as a professional, and IMO should be penalized for not following them.

If sentence was not original, then it needed attribution.  How could she NOT KNOW that she didn’t write that??  If she had mis-attributed it, that would be a simple mistake, but she didn’t attribute it at all.  And she’s not claiming that she intended to, either—she didn’t know where the words came from (although she must have known they weren’t hers), and she obviously didn’t care enough to find out.

I agree that the only possible consequences here would be those enforced by her employer; I’m disappointed that one of the country’s premiere news publications has lower standards than my community college.

I’m disappointed that one of the country’s premiere news
publications has lower standards than my community college.

Yes.  This.  I expected better from the New York Times.  And while plagarism isn’t illegal, it is unethical, and many professions have internal consequences—sometimes severe—for doing things that, while perfectly legal (taking hCG, for example), violate ethical standards, because they damage the credability of the profession as a whole.  Journalism, I feel, ought to operate the same way.  One journalist caught plagarising, falsifying information, or otherwise violating journalistic ethics tarnishes the reputation of both the paper they write for and the profession as a whole.

“As frustrating as it might seem, there is actually no law against plagiarism, except as defined within copyright law.”

What I am finding frustrating is the circling back to the limitations of the law—that, to me, is so not the point. Many things are not, on the face of it, actually illegal, but they are surely dishonourable and unacceptable. What is so troublesome to me is that the New York Times is reacting the way that they have. One might have expected—hoped—that they would set a higher standard.

This story has disappeared on Huff Post, doesn’t seem to have been mentioned on The Daily Beast and well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Thank goodness for writers like Nora Roberts ... and so many others ... who call a spade a spade and don’t seek to dilute or trivialize what happened by pointing to the legal non-consequences.

@Janet W: I was replying to Elspeth’s comment regarding why I associated a discussion of plagiarism with copyright law, not for the purpose of “diluting” or “trivializing”, but to point out that the only “consequences” that exist right now in a real way exist through copyright law.  Those laws can be strengthened in order to provide more penalties, but not without political action to strengthen them.

I think that with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there has been some strengthening with respect to online plagiarism, because online providers WILL remove content that is plagiarized upon presentation of prima facie evidence without having to go to the trouble of suing.  The only alternatives are, as Elspeth and some others have pointed out, strengthening the teeth of ethics guidelines in publishing and related professions that will effectively blacklist those who plagiarize.  There is a Livejournal community that published a list of LJ users who had provably plagiarized others: stop_plagiarism.livejournal.com is the community name, and a plethora of sites that are now offering step by step instructions on how to file DMCA reports against those who plagiarize others’ online content.  So there are things being done… but to date I have not heard of any serious political action being considered to actually pass a law against plagiarism.

Louise—

I think strengthening copryright law any further than it already has been strengthened would be a mistake, with consequences far worse than not punishing plagarism adequately.  The DMCA has already expanded IP law far beyond anything it’s ever covered before, occasionally at the expense of consumers (it makes some things that were previously fair use for non-digital material explicitly illegal for digital objects), and its provisions for electronic archives, preservation metadata, and the creation of preservation copies for back up are God-awful (only three copies for preservation purposes?  *Three*?  That’s three migrations to another platform and then the file is legally required to stagnate in an obselete format forever). 

Sorry—bitter DCMA hating records manager here.  The DCMA was wildly unpopular with my electronic records professors when I was getting my MLS, though Windows Vista and its compatibility problems have replaced it as public enemy number one these days, I think.