7 November 2010
What happens when you steal a medieval recipe for apple pie from a web site and publish it in a magazine and on Facebook, and then when the original author points out the theft you send her a snarky email?
The results are not pretty.
That’s exactly what Cook’s Source did. The magazine, which evidently is distributed for free in print and on Facebook, but accepts advertisements and does generate income, lifted an article and recipe by Monica Gaudio on medieval apple pies from the Gode Cookery website and republished it in their magazine and Facebook page.
When Ms. Gaudio discovered the theft, she contacted the magazine and after an exchange of emails in which she determined the magazine lifted the article directly from the Gode Cookery website, and not from some free database of recipes, and asked that a $130 donation be made to the Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment for the article, Ms. Gaudio received this reply from Cook’s Source editor Judith Briggs:
“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”
See Ms. Gaudio’s blog here in which she discusses the violation and posts the email.
I’ll leave it to the reader to form an opinion about the arrogance displayed in this email—as well as the editorial errors in Ms. Briggs’s email. But clearly Ms. Briggs doesn’t know about copyright laws. If she did, she would know that the web is not public domain. And the editing she did? Because the article has been partially taken down from the Facebook site, I can’t determine exactly what was changed, but from accounts of others I glean that all that Cook’s Source did was modernize some of the medieval spellings. (The end of the article is still up on Facebook as of this writing, showing that Cook’s Source is as incompetent at hiding their tracks as they are at the basics of professional editing and publishing.)
But the story gets better.
Not only is the Cook’s Source Facebook page swamped with a torrent of comments by outraged Facebookers, but some began to check the sources of other Cook’s Source articles. It seems that a large number of the recipes and articles in the magazine are “lifted” straight from the web, often without any kind of attribution. (Evidently, Ms. Gaudio was lucky to have her name put on the piece when Cook’s Source reprinted it.) One enterprising individual went so far as to compile a spreadsheet of 160 of these plagiarized articles.
All this has transpired over just four days since Ms. Gaudio made mention of it on her blog. Given that many of the stolen articles are from major media outlets with scads of lawyers on their payrolls, I think that Cook’s Source is not long for this world. Good riddance. We can only hope that Ms. Briggs doesn’t work in a professional editorial capacity ever again.
(Hat tip to Pharyngula—I’d post a link, but Science Blogs seems to be down at the moment.)
