January 12, 2006

WASHINGTON - John Carr, the head of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, started a Web log last month to comment on the issues facing his union, especially its contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration. He said he would post commentaries when "I have something to say, which could be often."

But from time to time, his blog (http://themainbang.typepad.com/) has addressed other topics ranging from board games to Pearl Harbor, and in dealing with those subjects the words on his blog have sometimes not been his own.

On Jan. 5, Carr posted an item about the history of the board game Monopoly.

"On this date in 1904 Lizzie J. Magie, a young Quaker woman living in Virginia, received a patent on a board game she had invented as an easy, fun-filled method of teaching the evils of land monopolism," Carr wrote in a five-paragraph account of the game's history.

That paragraph and two others were nearly verbatim from a 1976 article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that was posted on a Web site. The rest of Carr's posting was copied from the Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia, but he did not attribute it.

<snip>

"I'm not a journalist," Carr wrote to the Times. "I'm a union president who surfs the 'Net. But I will definitely be more careful."

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/01/12/Worldandnation/Union_leader_s_blog_d.shtml

an effort to silence this man, shut down the site, and intimidate him.
If this were a country that actually valued journalistic integrity, these might be valid points.
But this man doesn't claim to be a journalist -- he's a guy with an opinion.
Leave him alone.

Ya know it may be true that that paragraph and two others were lifted nearly verbatim from a 1976 article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that was posted on a Web site. The rest of Carr's posting was copied from the Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia, but he did not attribute it. In fact I bet lots of things go unattributed. So what, this story is nothing but a transparent attack, aided and abetted by any "news" paper that runs this NON STORY about nothing of any meaning.

BILL ADAIR, sptimes Washington Bureau Chief, you are on notice.

Time to check every sentence Bill Adair has ever written.

Blogs can put anything they want on their page as long as it's not copyrighted.

I research a lot of stuff on the Web, and depending on the subject, you'll find countless versions of the same text over and over again, with absolutely no credit to the original author (whomever that may have been). Try googling something like "Pearl Hart" or "Cattle Annie" and you'll see what I mean. It's a plagiarist's paradise out there.