Politiscoop Plagiarizes the ZRC Blog, Distorts Our Message
I really didn’t want to have to write this post.
In the wake of our original reporting on the Zombie Walk Against Governor Walker, a ‘Citizen Journalism’ site covering the Madison protests decided to copy large portions of our text without attribution as part of a slightly longer piece on the Zombie Walk. In fact, not only did they take our content without informing their readers it wasn’t their own work, but Politiscoop put it under someone else’s byline. Even more shockingly, their alterations and additions to the text clumsily attempt to transform it from a statement of support for Zombie Rights into a trite, defamatory piece of ‘conventional wisdom’ about the Differently Animated.
Here, for comparison, is how their blog post reads:
Sunday, 03 April 2011 10:34 Citizen Journalist
Madison Wisconsin -The Zombies were out in force to show solidarity with the Living hordes, aka ‘Unions’, who are faced with having their fundamental rights to gather and work collectively to better their lives stripped away by a college dropout who somehow stumbled his way into the Governor’s mansion (and promptly cut corporate taxes by over 100 million dollars, in a recession).
Saturdays walk was almost a look into Wisconsin’s Working class future as many appeared to be lifeless souls wandering the streets aimlessly in hopes of finding some GOP brains to feast upon though apparently in Madison Wisconsin there is a severe drought of Republican intelligence so the zombies walked with famine in mind.
Zombies know what it’s like to be told that they can’t gather together, can’t work together, aren’t allowed to form hordes to protest for a better Unlife, so they came out today to stand with their Living colleagues and lurch toward a brighter future. And this time, I think they got some serious results. Thanks to Cori a Scoop Reporter here at PolitiScoop for the fun photos!
Now here’s the relevant portion of our original post, written by me over 12 hours earlier:
The Zombies were out in force to show solidarity with the Living hordes, aka ‘Unions’, who are faced with having their fundamental rights to gather and work collectively to better their lives stripped away by a college dropout who somehow stumbled his way into the Governor’s mansion (and promptly cut corporate taxes by over 100 million dollars, in a recession).
Zombies know what it’s like to be told that they can’t gather together, can’t work together, aren’t allowed to form hordes to protest for a better Unlife, so they came out today to stand with their Living colleagues and lurch toward a brighter future. And this time, I think they got some serious results.
Here once again is ‘their’ post with the stolen content in bold:
Sunday, 03 April 2011 10:34 Citizen Journalist
Madison Wisconsin -The Zombies were out in force to show solidarity with the Living hordes, aka ‘Unions’, who are faced with having their fundamental rights to gather and work collectively to better their lives stripped away by a college dropout who somehow stumbled his way into the Governor’s mansion (and promptly cut corporate taxes by over 100 million dollars, in a recession).
Saturdays walk was almost a look into Wisconsin’s Working class future as many appeared to be lifeless souls wandering the streets aimlessly in hopes of finding some GOP brains to feast upon though apparently in Madison Wisconsin there is a severe drought of Republican intelligence so the zombies walked with famine in mind.
Zombies know what it’s like to be told that they can’t gather together, can’t work together, aren’t allowed to form hordes to protest for a better Unlife, so they came out today to stand with their Living colleagues and lurch toward a brighter future. And this time, I think they got some serious results. Thanks to Cori a Scoop Reporter here at PolitiScoop for the fun photos!
This has honestly never happened to me before. At the ZRC we release all our original content under a Creative Commons License. You are free to take some or all of our work, remix it, make derivatives, publish and republish it to your heart’s content – so long as you acknowledge us and don’t try to use our work for commercial gain.
I’m a very laid-back guy on these matters. If your site is commercial, but you wanted to to use a fairly big swath of our prose in a fair use context, I’m not going to make a fuss. Our flickr photos are published under a CC license, so I fully expect they get embedded in sites that are commercial from time to time. We’re not unreasonable here at the ZRC.
This Politiscoop thing is another matter entirely however. Not only did ‘Citizen Journalist’ steal my work by taking a fairly large piece with no acknowledgement that it was not his or her own intellectual property, they then distorted it with gratuitous slams against the Differently Animated, then shoved the resulting incoherent mishmash out there on the web, where it could further degrade and pollute our discourse.
Topping it all off? There’s a Paypal link at the top of the page hosting our stolen content so readers of the plagiarizing site can reward this ‘Citizen Journalist’ financially.
Shocking and unacceptable behavior all around. Potentially actionable too; I’m looking into that. In the meantime, I just wanted to set the record straight, on behalf of The Zombie Rights Campaign, that this material is altered, not representative of the positions of The Zombie Rights Movement, and Living Supremacist as well.
What an ugly development to come out of a fantastic event like the Zombie Walk.
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