Don’t Steal IGN’s Breasts
Let me tell you a story.
Sony pulled an anime from the PSN after they realised it was soft-core porn. Greg Miller wrote up an article for IGN. Obviously, as this is a story involving breasts that’s loosely tied to videogames, the story was soon picked up and spread (GameSpy, GamesRadar, Destructoid, Ripten, MaxConsole). As is the way with online articles, the original source often gets lost. GameSpy and MaxConsole sourced IGN. Destructoid sourced Ripten. GamesRadar sourced Destructoid.
The trouble is, Ripten didn’t source anyone. And that annoyed IGN’s News Editor Jim Reilly so much that he wrote a public blog post calling Ripten out for being thieves and plagiarists. To try to get to the bottom of things I spoke with Ripten’s founder, Chad Lakkis.
The story goes that Lakkis found the article on N4G late one evening and passed the link along to new staff writer Dave Oshry. By the early hours the post was up, Lakkis was asleep, and pictures of breasts were being looked at. Come morning Lakkis woke to find a rather large quantity of nasty comments (since deleted) on the article. “I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.” A bit of reading through the curses found a common trend: they were all complaining about a lack of source. Sure enough, Oshry neglected to add one. On finding his error he added links to both N4G and IGN. Yet, the comments continued.
Confused, a Google search was done and Lakkis found Miller’s post linking to Ripten with some rather blunt words.
[Ripten] didn’t feel the need to give proper credit and not only stole our story, but also our watermarked images that we posted. [...] The “writer” of this particular post probably spent 15 minutes plagiarizing Greg’s story that he spent a couple hours on.
You can argue the overall importance of this story, but the fact is it was stolen.
According to Lakkis, before this damning post was published, Miller never tried to contact himself, or Ripten, to request that attribution be added. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, nobody has contacted other sites that ran the story and didn’t source IGN either.
IGN also don’t have any obvious licence on their site limiting how their work should be used. They have a basic copyright notice under the article, but if IGN are using that as their protection then that means nobody is allowed to use any information they find on IGN. This article would technically break the copyright, even if it didn’t have the above quote in.
Miller declined comment for this article.
Were people honestly paying for porn on PSN? Pfft, people paying for porn.
Also, thats kind of disappointing. I heard Jim Reilly on a recent episode of Rebel FM and he sounded like a pretty cool guy. I guess hes just an angry ass.
People in the gaming “press” being retards? I think I may have had a heart attack from all the shock.
This was kind of an ass way to handle things, but he has a point. I don’t care if you use the label “journalist” or not. In this case the writer was a reporter. He reported “news.” In reporting you source everything, always, no discussion allowed.
He should have called out the other sites too, but this isn’t an isolated incident for Ripten.
That’s why whenever a story “breaks” on Ripten I go looking for the real source.
@Hans Wuerflein:
Sorry you feel that way Hans. Many fine writers, including John Kershaw himself, have passed through Ripten’s doors, and I don’t make it a point to employ content thieves. It is and has always been our policy to source news, and with the exception of rare accidental oversights such as this I believe we have done a good job doing so.
Cheers
@Chad: I don’t doubt that there are great writers at Ripten, but on multiple occasions I’ve been sent tips (or just had friends send me stuff they thought was interesting) on Ripten, but found either non-sourced, or incorrectly sourced articles.
There is some great content on your site, and I’m sure the majority of the omissions are either mistakes or just out of laziness and not actual attempts at plagiarizing others work, but it happens enough (or I just stumble onto the bad ones) that I check elsewhere to verify the source.
Gentlemen, gentlemen. I tweeted about this well ahead of anyone else mentioned here. http://twitter.com/darkwhitehair/status/17912274754
My anonymous secret inside sources gave me the heads up and I decided to tweet it to my faithful followers… Ok… ok… I saw it on the Giantbomb forums.
@Chad: Most of the articles on your site are fine, I’m sure. I just checked the ones on the front page and nothing jumped out at me.
But I’ve also seen an interview quoted that didn’t say where the interview was from or who conducted it.
@Chad: I was reffering to IGN not ripten, mostly because I’ve never really read ripten, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure it’s easy to accidently miss out sources.
I realize I might come off a bit harsh on this matter, but I’m still finishing a journalism degree, where every project not only has to go past the editors, but also past your professors.
Not sourcing = fail (literally)
This is an article about an article concerning boobs and it rises above all others.