Not to degenerate Venture Beat at all, but really a spat over attribution is one way to start out Monday morning, probably not the best one we could think of, but there it is all the same. Reminds me of academic honesty, there are no consequences for plagiarism on the internet, but boy do schools hammer students who do not properly attribute sources, and in some cases, to the point of bouncing students out of entire programs.
The whole story revolves around Ars Technica and Venture Beat, who both wrote about Apple IPhone penetration on the worldwide market. The striking similarity between maps and theory is there. If I was grading the paper, I would be running both of them through turitin and looking at more similarities along the way.
In a link from Paris Lemon points to Duncan Riley’s thoughts from 2007 on just how much does Ars Technica rip off story ideas? There is a certain amount of humor here though given our past encounter with someone claiming to be from Ars.
Our own issue with Ars Technica rolls around this article where they got all sorts of cranky pissed off because we quoted one of their articles. Hey who knew they didn’t like back links or attribution on their own right from another blog? Who knew we were a spam blog, really, we didn’t know that either.
Ars is Ars, they provide something and are popular, even if they hate backlinks, or do not properly attribute, in the end game, things like this happen, and while it is not right, Ars seems to be in their own universe when it comes to the blogging world. As long as they stay in their own universe things are ok and as long as they are not harassing us, that is even better.
We have seen this same issue played out all over the place, who owns the idea, who owns the content, and some ideas are just better than others. They inspire, and in reading the two articles, to me they seem very similar, again back to the school house and grading, I would be talking to both students about now.
Oh an on a closing note, we really dare Ars to come back and call us a spam blog again, because we linked to one of their articles with proper attribution.
tags: ars technica, venture beat, paris lemon, duncan riley, techwag, attribution, iphone, risk, map, spat
