plagiarism or just the news merry-go-round

original content or public domain

[lucertola]

Hi all,
I'm new here too & would appreciate your wisdom as well as patience with a more or less constant problem at a small independent news site.

Here's the scenario:
Our journalist picks up a short item from a wire story or a local paper.

Puts some sort of spin on it -- either adding context or numbers, sometimes interviews -- we publish.

Print media then picks up the story with the same spin, without giving us any credit.

Add to the mix the original wire story is *not* in English, our material is in English and the print stories are all in English too.

Our items are not usually super topical -- in other words it's fairly clear that the other journalists are reading us, eg one news item came out two months ago in local press, we did a story and in 48 hours it was in three different papers...

Perhaps it's just frustrating but no big deal -- reading in the local language and using news judgment isn't really anything proprietary...
And we do use a creative commons license -- for non-profit sites...

But when I see an article circulate, more or less identical, on for-profit news outlets (and in one case a big syndicate) I just want to scream...

Naturally, any time we've tried to write to editors they have never even bothered to answer, thinking we're total crackpots...

Thoughts?
Thanks
Ric

[rogerd]

Non-exclusive news stories are subject to all kinds of second-hand reporting and rewriting. Exclusive stories, e.g., an interview conducted by a single publication or documents obtained by one reporter, are trickier - it's common to report those second had but by citing the source, as in, "In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Warren Buffet said..."

There is a huge herd instinct among reporters. Time and time again, I've seen one publication run a story about a topic, and within a week a dozen others are covering the same thing. Responsible publications, of course, do their own research and reporting, i.e., they rip off the idea but no the content.

If you can demonstrate a copyright infringement because of unique story elements, you can certainly try to go after a copycat. A pattern of copied stories might further support your case. Having said that, though, if they have done a thorough rewrite and don't make use of sources or facts exclusive to you, you'll probably have an uphill battle.

[lucertola]

I know what you mean about the re-working of material, that confirms my suspicion...UPI for example runs a lot of stories that read like "AP reported that local newspaper said" they're all 'outsourced' in that sense...

But basically a lot of times it's almost exactly the same, including the same quote etc. If we filed a complaint to google, is google going to check for a short wire story that came out earlier in a different language?

We have gone after some news services that have a base in our country -- and they were pretty good about it, the bosses now regularly read the stuff we post & the journalists under them don't touch it anymore...

I've never seriously considered going after someone, as the situation would be this: tiny organization (in unimportant country) goes after giant news organization (in US or UK) -- has anyone here ever tried to take someone to task from abroad?