![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerI have been paid the ultimate accolade for a (former, now part-time) academic: I have had my work ripped off!
When I saw the Cloud Law twitter feed feature an article entitled "Cloud contracts -- the Devil is in the detail" I was naturally intrigued. After all, I spent a good chunk of my time at the QMUL Cloud Legal Project researching exactly this topic. Having the article, I swiftly came to the conclusion that it's author had taken a short cut: he appears to have spent ten minutes researching our paper.
Now, no actual words written by me are copied. But the cited examples of contentious Terms of Service are lifted directly from the ones we cite, down to selection of the particular bits of text. Furthermore, some of those quoted terms have since been updated (the Facebook one now reads a little differently, for instance.) So this probably isn't copyright infringement, although it is sailing rather close to the wind. It feels rather like passing off of our work as his own by the author though.
If this was in an academic publication I'd probably get one of my senior co-authors to write a miffed letter. (Trust me, you do not want a miffed Ian Walden after you.) As it's in an industry rag though, and appears to have been culled in any case from a corporate blog, I'll just take it in the spirit Tom Lehrer expounded upon.
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
When I saw the Cloud Law twitter feed feature an article entitled "Cloud contracts -- the Devil is in the detail" I was naturally intrigued. After all, I spent a good chunk of my time at the QMUL Cloud Legal Project researching exactly this topic. Having the article, I swiftly came to the conclusion that it's author had taken a short cut: he appears to have spent ten minutes researching our paper.
Now, no actual words written by me are copied. But the cited examples of contentious Terms of Service are lifted directly from the ones we cite, down to selection of the particular bits of text. Furthermore, some of those quoted terms have since been updated (the Facebook one now reads a little differently, for instance.) So this probably isn't copyright infringement, although it is sailing rather close to the wind. It feels rather like passing off of our work as his own by the author though.
If this was in an academic publication I'd probably get one of my senior co-authors to write a miffed letter. (Trust me, you do not want a miffed Ian Walden after you.) As it's in an industry rag though, and appears to have been culled in any case from a corporate blog, I'll just take it in the spirit Tom Lehrer expounded upon.
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
