Intellectual Property Law

Ars Technica Has No Shame, But That's Nothing New

By Cynthia Brumfield

(Updated commentary at the end of the post.)

MG Siegler has this well-justified rant against uber-tech news site Ars Technica. His basic complaint is that Ars Technica is "really good at stealing other's ideas" because they ripped off a piece he did likening the global spread of the iPhone to the game of Risk. MG links back to an earlier piece by Duncan Riley that makes the same point.

It's true that great minds think alike and that ideas can arise among many people simultaneously. It's called synchronicity or zeitgeist or sometimes just coincidence. We all see it all the time and we know it when we see it.

That's not the case with Ars Technica. What MG doesn't mention is that I complained about this very issue back in 2006 when I discovered that Ars Technica was actually excerpting my blog posts without appropriate linkbacks or attribution. I soon heard from others who bore a similar grudge against the site.

My complaint is actually featured in the Wikipedia write-up of Ars Technica. Moreover, in an otherwise glowing piece about Ars last month, Kara Swisher references my blog post that calls out Ars for its lack of originality and its borderline ethics.

In short, Ars Technica has been called on this issue time and again, its editors and writers are obviously aware of how peers view the publication, and yet Ars Technica continues to sift through the blogosphere and mainstream media with shameful sticky fingers. I stopped reading the site long ago for this reason (and because even after I wrote my blog post, I couldn't help but see fishy, reiterative posts on the site, real or imagined.)

How can a publication earn the disrespect of its peers and readers and consistently ignore the criticism? I can only conclude that this Ars Technica habit pays off with traffic, links, diggs and money.

It's one thing for a battle-scarred, hard-nosed presidential candidate to abandon any sense of shame in a desperate last-chance to win a nomination that she believes is rightfully hers. But it's another thing for a successful publication with tons of resources and talented writers to jettison any sense of pride of authorship.

Why does Ars Technica do this when it doesn't need to, when it could clearly craft first-rate pieces without ever having to rip anybody off? It's a weird little tempest in a teapot that perhaps hints at some kind of upper echelon editorial stinginess that filters down through the writing team.

Update: OK, a lot of bloggers have complaints about Ars Technica's attribution policies and have shared them with me again today, and apparently shared them with MG Siegler (who has received a lot of emails) via private comments that they don't want shared with the world. Why? Because they're hoping Ars Technica will toss them a scrap with some kind of link, however overdue or misplaced, because Ars Technica drives a lot of traffic. I can sympathize but is traffic really worth it?

Full post as published by IP Democracy on May 12, 2008 (boomark / email).