Posted on 07/11/2006 10:13:59 PM PDT by StAnDeliver
Anchor: "And with us now is the president and CEO of the firm called iThenticate. Thank you for being with us tonight..."**Later (long interview)**
Q: "When the Post asks you to go after Ann Coulter, did you know what were you getting into there?"
Barrie: "Well, this is what happened. The Post came to us originally and they were doing a story about how Oprah Winfrey was using our technology to screen things for her show. And the Post wanted to see an example of how our technology worked. So they took a 2005 speech from Hillary Clinton and ran it through our service. And right off the bat, we caught the speechwriter for Hillary Clinton plagiarizing. And the journalist from the Post said what else can we run through your service? And a couple weeks later as the brouhaha about Ann Coulter and what she said about the 9-11 widows was reaching its peak, the New York Post called me back and said Ann Coulter's book "Godless" is what we want to run through your system. They digitized the book and took one year of her syndicated columns and sent it over to us to analyze."
Q: "What did you find?"
Barrie: "And we found as I mentioned, found some textbook cases of plagiarism in both her syndicated columns and in the book. And after finding about three or four instances in the book and three or four instances in the column, I said look, I just had enough of reading Ann Coulter and the Post said 'That's enough for us. There's our story.' And case proven I guess."
Why would iThenticate think they need to license journal articles to enter them in their database unless their own attorneys were worried about possible copyright violations?
After checking the list of supposed plagarisms, I reccommend:
Sell iThenticate stock..
Speechwriter, eh? I kind of remember Joe Biden taking the fall for plagiarizing Neil Kinnock. Why does the speechwriter get in trouble and not Hitlery???
Whoa - this cold medicine must be working well. I'm thinking to myself, 'why would Gerald Ford want to defame Chevy Chase?' I think I need some caffiene or something...
"Hmmmmmm, isn't making an unauthorized digital copy of a book a copyright infringement?"
Only if you do it for profit. Which they did.
What are they going to say, "All we published were the excepts that she plagiarized"?
Double-busted, pal.
This is pure horse hockey, which is why even the lame stream media has not gone gone full bore after this story. The would-be critics make their own living with words and are reluctant to have iThenticate run them through the same hypervigilent filter. The point is, when you're reporting lists and matters of a purely factual nature, what Ann Coulter did falls well within established and accepted practice.
What are they going to say, "All we published were the excepts that she plagiarized"?
Double-busted, pal.
This is pure horse hockey, which is why even the lame stream media has not gone gone full bore after this story. The would-be critics make their own living with words and are reluctant to have iThenticate run them through the same hypervigilent filter. The point is, when you're reporting lists and matters of a purely factual nature, what Ann Coulter did falls well within established and accepted practice.
I would think if this company was paid for their services by the Post, they have in fact violated the copyright.
Note that they said, "textbook cases". This may be something as simple as someone having paraphrased or quoted something they read a long time ago and had forgotten the source or even that it needed attribution.
The big problem with iThenticate being used as the sole device to prove plagiarism is that it's a word matching program. Plagiarism, OTOH, is the deliberate stealing of another person's work and representing it as one's own. Word matches are a necessary part of it but don't necessarily prove intent. In other words, it's a lot like a computerized fingerprint identification program--it gives an investigator very good leads about what to look into but doesn't actually prove a case without that further investigation. In Ann's case the further investigation has shown there actually was no plagiarism.
Another good analogy is to a computer spell checking program. All any one of those does is catch unknown words; however, a computer spell check, vital as it is, is only the first step in cleaning up a document before it's released. The author still must proof the document to assure that words are properly used in context.
Maybe because he saw European Vacation?
Thanks for the input. There is no doubt in my mind that they did this with malice, but proving it is another thing, that is a certainty.
And the Post wanted to see an example of how our technology worked. So they took a 2005 speech from Hillary Clinton and ran it through our service. And right off the bat, we caught the speechwriter for Hillary Clinton plagiarizing.
BUMP
Like witches and water, vampires and the light, slugs and salt, avg and ABBA, ...
I ran Jon Barrie's stats through my special Child Molester Identfication Software and registered a hit.
Haven't e-mailed Barrie yet, was looking at his website for an address.
Did watch this interview again (TiVo), and the transcript is absolutely accurate.
Vlogging the excerpt of the interview would be a good idea, or forwarding it to someone who can. As soon as I can find the time...
You will find this interview interesting.
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