On Copyrights and Related Matters... subject logo: CULTURE
2006-04-25
Posted by: badanov

From Massachusetts comes a story that a sophomore student at Harvard who gained a $500,000 book contract was caught plagiarizing the work of another author.

This revelation dovetails nicely with recent posts from Steve H. at Hog on Ice about a website copying Steve's work in its entirety and failing to post adequate attribution, including explicit permission from the author.

We worry about this some. The story about if WWII was a MMORG was lifted in its entirety from another website including the formatting which made it funny and unique. While we did provide a link to the original we did fail to include a disclaimer that the work was someone else's, and we did fail to get the author's permission to republish the material as formatted.

Usually on this blog anything which is not originally conceived by us does has a link of some kind back to the source.

Our recent posts about Soviet military history is an example. There is an awful lot of material out there about the Eastern Front, a subject which we have studied for 20 years, and have read texts on in English and Russian.

Much of the facts we represent are sometimes conclusions gleaned from a number of sources. The Russian side of that terrible war is a terrible source for information because so much of it is party propaganda, but much of it is based on real events.

An example of conclusions would be our thinking that much of the recon for convoys from England and American coming through to Murmansk was in part the result of a Soviet coast watching system set up in Norway.

We know this is likely due to a description of historians Paul Carrell and Albert Seaton that the Soviets were expert in espionage, using both inserted and native contacts to maintain the networks necessary to transmit information for warmaking. The Russians used no radar and since they were responsible for the convoys past the 160th longitude, it stood to reason that the Soviets had help in Norway likely from Norwegian communists and detailing when German patrol boats left ports and when German aerial patrols, both naval and otherwise left the airfield. It had to be because the Soviets needed the advanced warning for convoys.

Is a Soviet coast watching system a historical fact? No, but it is a historical likelihood.

The upshot to all this is that we try to provide full attribution to everything we publish and when we fail we will make an acknowledgment.

We may have failed in the humor article, and we may well take it down permanently because of it. If anyone remarks here they were misled, we will remove the post.

If you have something to add, Fire Away!

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