On Cooks Source, copyright, ethics, and how we react
The Cooks Source debacle has been very interesting to watch and got me thinking in all kinds of interesting directions.
In case you missed this nuclear explosion on the internet yesterday, here's basically what happened: A woman named Monica Gaudio (illadore) discovered that an article she wrote a while ago had been reprinted without her permission in a magazine called Cooks Source, both online and print versions. Charitably assuming that it was an honest mistake, she contacted the magazine and asked them to formally apologize and make a minor donation to a journalism school. She received a reply from the editor, one Judith Griggs, which (at least in the excerpt that illadore posted) made two basic points: a) it was okay for Griggs to have used Gaudio's piece because "the web is considered public domain" and b) Gaudio should be grateful to Griggs for having cleaned up her article, which Griggs says was in terrible need of editing. According to Griggs, her edits make the piece better, and therefore improve Gaudio's portfolio, and therefore Gaudio should be paying HER for the service!
So Gaudio posted the story on her LJ, and a friend of hers posted a fuller version on his LJ which apparently has a lot of readers, and the next thing you know it's being tweeted and blogged everywhere, and people find the Cooks Source Facebook page and start bombarding it with insults.
Then the story took a bit of a turn later in the day yesterday, when people started going through the older issues of Cooks Source (posted on its Facebook page) and discovered that basically every article in the whole damn thing has been stolen from somewhere or other. And not just articles, but images as well -- in many cases the images have been lifted from other websites and simply flipped around or similar. You can check out this thread on the Facebook discussion page where people list examples, and there's also this excellent piece of investigative journalism wherein the author contacted a number of people/companies whose content was used in Cooks Source, and almost all of them confirmed that they had never heard of Cooks Source nor given permission for their stuff to be used in it.
As this NPR blog piece very cogently explains, it becomes increasingly evident that this Judith Griggs is not an evil thief but merely a very, very stupid person who honestly believes that you can take anything you find on the internet and publish it in your magazine -- for profit -- without asking the author's permission. If it were a single example, that would be one thing, but once you find that she has been systematically lifting content from all over the web for years, it's reasonable to conclude (Occam's Razor) that she truly thought it was okay. And you know, I can almost see it. I can almost see someone sitting there going, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice to have one central place where you can find all the interesting articles on cooking and food that have been written lately?" And the thing is, that kind of thing is done all over. If Griggs had written a blog, where she basically summarized and then linked to the articles in question (rather than reproducing them wholesale), or created some kind of RSS feed aggregator or such, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It was in collecting the articles into something that she called a magazine, and printing them up, and selling advertising space to go with them, that she crossed a line. And I can easily envision that she simply didn't realize she was crossing that line. Even though most of the articles in question have very clear, hard-to-miss copyright statements; if you really believed that "the web is public domain," you might just choose to ignore those.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending Griggs. If indeed she is that clueless about copyright issues, it's absolutely inexcusable. No one should have the audacity to call herself an editor, to run a magazine (she is apparently the sole person on staff), who is that egregiously clueless about basic publishing concepts. And Griggs severely compounded her mistakes by writing her astoundingly obnoxious, condescending, and insulting response to Gaudio. The tone of her message is also entirely inexcusable. I find it particularly interesting that she references having 3 decades of experience in the journalism/publishing industry -- and she presents that as if it's a good thing, whereas in fact, in this case, it's her downfall. The days are gone when having that kind of seniority in an industry like journalism was a good thing. In the modern era, if you're still doing journalism the way you were doing it thirty years ago, you are in serious trouble. The Web has redesigned -- nay, is in a continual process of re-redesigning -- what journalism is, and you cannot be in that industry and not acknowledge that, and you cannot lord it over younger people in the field, because it's precisely because they are younger and newer to the business that makes them better at it than you.
Certainly, Griggs's editorial career is over; regardless of whether any of the large companies or small individual writers whose work she stole choose to sue, the story has gotten everywhere, her name is all over it, it will be all anyone can find if they google her for all eternity. She is over and done with. If nothing else, Griggs has damned herself by her total silence in the past day. If Gaudio had been able to post a couple of hours later "Hey, never mind, I heard from her and she's really sorry and promised to make it right" the whole thing might -- MIGHT -- have died down. But Griggs has said nothing while the imprecations fly and the story spreads. The Internet being what it is, she's still ruined even if it should turn out that Gaudio made the whole thing up (which frankly I find extremely unlikely, but the possibility should at least be mentioned). So, in a sense, whether Griggs was acting in good faith (naive and stupid good faith, but still) or deliberately set out to steal people's work, is irrelevant.
But what really interests me about this story is how it managed to touch such a nerve. I mean, I watched the thing unfold yesterday in real-time on Twitter, Facebook, and Google; throughout the day, the number and type of hits that popped up when you googled "Cooks Source" kept evolving, as did the posts on the magazine's Facebook page. A lot of stories of "company screwing over the little guy" hit the internet every day, but this one in particular took off like wildfire. And I've found it really interesting to think about why that happened.
First of all, of course, people took serious umbrage to Griggs's insulting tone, as I mentioned above. In Gaudio's original livejournal post on the story, Gaudio comes off sounding very reasonable, while Griggs comes off sounding horrendously obnoxious, rude, and condescending. People hate that.
Second, the bit about the web being public domain makes most reasonable people first gasp, then give a little "oh she must be joking" chuckle, and then gasp again when it hits them that she isn't joking. The Web is not public domain, period. There is ample precedent for this; it is not up for discussion. It just isn't.
Third, the sheer unmitigated gall of suggesting that Gaudio should be GRATEFUL for having her work stolen -- nay, indeed, that she should consider paying Griggs for the favor of editing and reprinting her piece! -- makes anyone who has ever written anything seethe with pure infuriated speechlessness.
Fourth, at its base, Griggs's message to Gaudio touches on a sore point that people who write for the web are very passionate (and, to be fair, defensive) about: namely, the notion that writing for the web is somehow "less" -- less valid, less valuable, less meaningful, less legitimate. Many bloggers -- even the really influential ones, with millions of readers and lots of advertising revenue and so forth -- are still having to defend themselves on occasion, often to elderly family members and the like, certainly to the "old guard" of journalism. Many such bloggers are rightfully very tired of having to fight to be recognized as "real" writers, as people producing valuable content and doing legitimate journalism. And it's particularly hurtful and irritating to receive that attitude from someone in the industry, someone who ought to be "on the same side."
Finally, in a similar vein, the idea that someone can actually defend stealing journalistic work hits on another sore point and a fear/worry that many people who write on the web try not to think about. I've even seen this mentioned outright in some of the comments on some of the posts about the story. Anyone who writes for the web knows that there's the possibility of her work being stolen; you know that no matter how much vanity-surfing you do, you can never be completely sure of finding everywhere your work is referenced or excerpted or used; you know that the copyright statement on your webpages is basically just text that will not stop anyone with the will and determination to ignore it. And you know, unfortunately, that even if you do find someone using your stuff without permission, there's little enough that you can do about it beyond asking them to stop, and maybe contacting their web provider. As several of the spinoff articles about this whole thing have mentioned, initiating a lawsuit for copyright infringement is prohibitive in terms of both financial cost and time/effort; the average "little guy" who runs his/her own blog for personal fulfillment simply isn't in a position to pursue a court case. So most "little guys" who write for the web try not to think too hard about how easy it would be to steal our work; and mostly we try to hold onto hope that if it does happen, the perpetrator will immediately apologize and take the stuff down. So to see a case where the theft was so blatant, and where the perpetrator did basically the polar opposite of immediately apologizing -- indeed, where the perp defended her actions and condescended and all the other stuff I mentioned in the first three points -- is really outrageous and worrisome to people. It takes us out of our safe little bubble of denial and forces us to look straight at the reality of how easily we could be ripped off and how helpless we'd be to defend ourselves.
And so, people respond by wanting to help illadore defend herself -- to make her not be helpless, and by extension make us feel less so. Thus why so many people (including me!) were moved to blog about the story, to tweet it, to disseminate it far and wide. And of course also why so many were moved to excoriate Griggs on the Facebook page and elsewhere.
The sad fact is that this stuff is undoubtedly going on all over the place. Cooks Source is a particularly egregious example, of course, because of the sheer volume of stuff that it stole, and the bad behavior of its editor when called out. But anyone who thinks that Griggs is in a class by herself needs to wake up and smell the burning silicon.
This case is great in terms of visibility; it is still spreading and its ripples will be felt across the internet and the journalism world for a long time to come; one hopes that if there are other people out there cluelessly and wantonly stealing stuff, they'll hear about Griggs and go "zomg I resemble that remark!" and mend their ways. It could happen. In any case, more attention given to the topic of internet copyright, and of the validity of online journalism, can only be a good thing. So this story isn't really about Judith Griggs any more. Like I said, she's over. She's finished. She has already become a verb ("dude I totally griggsed my term paper") and a caricature. Even if she comes forward right now, while I'm typing this, and falls on her sword, she can't stop this avalanche. So she's basically irrelevant already. What matters now is the ongoing discussion and what it can contribute to the evolution of online journalism, copyright law, and the more general question of ethics in the modern world.
In case you missed this nuclear explosion on the internet yesterday, here's basically what happened: A woman named Monica Gaudio (illadore) discovered that an article she wrote a while ago had been reprinted without her permission in a magazine called Cooks Source, both online and print versions. Charitably assuming that it was an honest mistake, she contacted the magazine and asked them to formally apologize and make a minor donation to a journalism school. She received a reply from the editor, one Judith Griggs, which (at least in the excerpt that illadore posted) made two basic points: a) it was okay for Griggs to have used Gaudio's piece because "the web is considered public domain" and b) Gaudio should be grateful to Griggs for having cleaned up her article, which Griggs says was in terrible need of editing. According to Griggs, her edits make the piece better, and therefore improve Gaudio's portfolio, and therefore Gaudio should be paying HER for the service!
So Gaudio posted the story on her LJ, and a friend of hers posted a fuller version on his LJ which apparently has a lot of readers, and the next thing you know it's being tweeted and blogged everywhere, and people find the Cooks Source Facebook page and start bombarding it with insults.
Then the story took a bit of a turn later in the day yesterday, when people started going through the older issues of Cooks Source (posted on its Facebook page) and discovered that basically every article in the whole damn thing has been stolen from somewhere or other. And not just articles, but images as well -- in many cases the images have been lifted from other websites and simply flipped around or similar. You can check out this thread on the Facebook discussion page where people list examples, and there's also this excellent piece of investigative journalism wherein the author contacted a number of people/companies whose content was used in Cooks Source, and almost all of them confirmed that they had never heard of Cooks Source nor given permission for their stuff to be used in it.
As this NPR blog piece very cogently explains, it becomes increasingly evident that this Judith Griggs is not an evil thief but merely a very, very stupid person who honestly believes that you can take anything you find on the internet and publish it in your magazine -- for profit -- without asking the author's permission. If it were a single example, that would be one thing, but once you find that she has been systematically lifting content from all over the web for years, it's reasonable to conclude (Occam's Razor) that she truly thought it was okay. And you know, I can almost see it. I can almost see someone sitting there going, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice to have one central place where you can find all the interesting articles on cooking and food that have been written lately?" And the thing is, that kind of thing is done all over. If Griggs had written a blog, where she basically summarized and then linked to the articles in question (rather than reproducing them wholesale), or created some kind of RSS feed aggregator or such, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It was in collecting the articles into something that she called a magazine, and printing them up, and selling advertising space to go with them, that she crossed a line. And I can easily envision that she simply didn't realize she was crossing that line. Even though most of the articles in question have very clear, hard-to-miss copyright statements; if you really believed that "the web is public domain," you might just choose to ignore those.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending Griggs. If indeed she is that clueless about copyright issues, it's absolutely inexcusable. No one should have the audacity to call herself an editor, to run a magazine (she is apparently the sole person on staff), who is that egregiously clueless about basic publishing concepts. And Griggs severely compounded her mistakes by writing her astoundingly obnoxious, condescending, and insulting response to Gaudio. The tone of her message is also entirely inexcusable. I find it particularly interesting that she references having 3 decades of experience in the journalism/publishing industry -- and she presents that as if it's a good thing, whereas in fact, in this case, it's her downfall. The days are gone when having that kind of seniority in an industry like journalism was a good thing. In the modern era, if you're still doing journalism the way you were doing it thirty years ago, you are in serious trouble. The Web has redesigned -- nay, is in a continual process of re-redesigning -- what journalism is, and you cannot be in that industry and not acknowledge that, and you cannot lord it over younger people in the field, because it's precisely because they are younger and newer to the business that makes them better at it than you.
Certainly, Griggs's editorial career is over; regardless of whether any of the large companies or small individual writers whose work she stole choose to sue, the story has gotten everywhere, her name is all over it, it will be all anyone can find if they google her for all eternity. She is over and done with. If nothing else, Griggs has damned herself by her total silence in the past day. If Gaudio had been able to post a couple of hours later "Hey, never mind, I heard from her and she's really sorry and promised to make it right" the whole thing might -- MIGHT -- have died down. But Griggs has said nothing while the imprecations fly and the story spreads. The Internet being what it is, she's still ruined even if it should turn out that Gaudio made the whole thing up (which frankly I find extremely unlikely, but the possibility should at least be mentioned). So, in a sense, whether Griggs was acting in good faith (naive and stupid good faith, but still) or deliberately set out to steal people's work, is irrelevant.
But what really interests me about this story is how it managed to touch such a nerve. I mean, I watched the thing unfold yesterday in real-time on Twitter, Facebook, and Google; throughout the day, the number and type of hits that popped up when you googled "Cooks Source" kept evolving, as did the posts on the magazine's Facebook page. A lot of stories of "company screwing over the little guy" hit the internet every day, but this one in particular took off like wildfire. And I've found it really interesting to think about why that happened.
First of all, of course, people took serious umbrage to Griggs's insulting tone, as I mentioned above. In Gaudio's original livejournal post on the story, Gaudio comes off sounding very reasonable, while Griggs comes off sounding horrendously obnoxious, rude, and condescending. People hate that.
Second, the bit about the web being public domain makes most reasonable people first gasp, then give a little "oh she must be joking" chuckle, and then gasp again when it hits them that she isn't joking. The Web is not public domain, period. There is ample precedent for this; it is not up for discussion. It just isn't.
Third, the sheer unmitigated gall of suggesting that Gaudio should be GRATEFUL for having her work stolen -- nay, indeed, that she should consider paying Griggs for the favor of editing and reprinting her piece! -- makes anyone who has ever written anything seethe with pure infuriated speechlessness.
Fourth, at its base, Griggs's message to Gaudio touches on a sore point that people who write for the web are very passionate (and, to be fair, defensive) about: namely, the notion that writing for the web is somehow "less" -- less valid, less valuable, less meaningful, less legitimate. Many bloggers -- even the really influential ones, with millions of readers and lots of advertising revenue and so forth -- are still having to defend themselves on occasion, often to elderly family members and the like, certainly to the "old guard" of journalism. Many such bloggers are rightfully very tired of having to fight to be recognized as "real" writers, as people producing valuable content and doing legitimate journalism. And it's particularly hurtful and irritating to receive that attitude from someone in the industry, someone who ought to be "on the same side."
Finally, in a similar vein, the idea that someone can actually defend stealing journalistic work hits on another sore point and a fear/worry that many people who write on the web try not to think about. I've even seen this mentioned outright in some of the comments on some of the posts about the story. Anyone who writes for the web knows that there's the possibility of her work being stolen; you know that no matter how much vanity-surfing you do, you can never be completely sure of finding everywhere your work is referenced or excerpted or used; you know that the copyright statement on your webpages is basically just text that will not stop anyone with the will and determination to ignore it. And you know, unfortunately, that even if you do find someone using your stuff without permission, there's little enough that you can do about it beyond asking them to stop, and maybe contacting their web provider. As several of the spinoff articles about this whole thing have mentioned, initiating a lawsuit for copyright infringement is prohibitive in terms of both financial cost and time/effort; the average "little guy" who runs his/her own blog for personal fulfillment simply isn't in a position to pursue a court case. So most "little guys" who write for the web try not to think too hard about how easy it would be to steal our work; and mostly we try to hold onto hope that if it does happen, the perpetrator will immediately apologize and take the stuff down. So to see a case where the theft was so blatant, and where the perpetrator did basically the polar opposite of immediately apologizing -- indeed, where the perp defended her actions and condescended and all the other stuff I mentioned in the first three points -- is really outrageous and worrisome to people. It takes us out of our safe little bubble of denial and forces us to look straight at the reality of how easily we could be ripped off and how helpless we'd be to defend ourselves.
And so, people respond by wanting to help illadore defend herself -- to make her not be helpless, and by extension make us feel less so. Thus why so many people (including me!) were moved to blog about the story, to tweet it, to disseminate it far and wide. And of course also why so many were moved to excoriate Griggs on the Facebook page and elsewhere.
The sad fact is that this stuff is undoubtedly going on all over the place. Cooks Source is a particularly egregious example, of course, because of the sheer volume of stuff that it stole, and the bad behavior of its editor when called out. But anyone who thinks that Griggs is in a class by herself needs to wake up and smell the burning silicon.
This case is great in terms of visibility; it is still spreading and its ripples will be felt across the internet and the journalism world for a long time to come; one hopes that if there are other people out there cluelessly and wantonly stealing stuff, they'll hear about Griggs and go "zomg I resemble that remark!" and mend their ways. It could happen. In any case, more attention given to the topic of internet copyright, and of the validity of online journalism, can only be a good thing. So this story isn't really about Judith Griggs any more. Like I said, she's over. She's finished. She has already become a verb ("dude I totally griggsed my term paper") and a caricature. Even if she comes forward right now, while I'm typing this, and falls on her sword, she can't stop this avalanche. So she's basically irrelevant already. What matters now is the ongoing discussion and what it can contribute to the evolution of online journalism, copyright law, and the more general question of ethics in the modern world.