If I wrote it for you, how much of it belongs to me?
Back in August 2005 I received a rather cryptic email that was just intriguing enough to get me to respond. After a couple of cloak & dagger style exchanges, it turned out the person on the other end was from a little recruiting shop in Atlanta called TalentZoo, which also happened to run a successful site for advertising people. They wanted to start a new blog and were interested in having me join up for the cause. Being a young, ambitious ad guy, I readily did so (for free). Not long after, Beyond Madison Avenue was born.
It started off with just a few people, of which Mack Collier quickly emerged as the impromptu leader. Over the course of the next year, we gained a few new faces - Paul McEnany, Jayne Karalow, and Sean Howard to name a few - and lost a few of the old ones. Eventually, Mack slipped away to focus on The Viral Garden - an effort for which he’s become quite well known. I was asked to fill his shoes in an editorial position. Over the course of the following year (our second), we gained a significant number of readers. We settled solidly into the top 70 of AdAge’s Power 150 listing (which by then was more than 400 blogs long). We beat out Wired, Seth Godin, and Logic + Emotion in Jaffe’s Most Valuable Blog competition. Not a bad year all in all.
From the beginning, TalentZoo’s involvement was limited to hosting and some banner space; we were otherwise left to our own devices. Unfortunately, our growing success was met with new rules and less control, both of which ultimately served to drive the core team of writers on to other ventures. Despite having left things a little rough - there was some disagreement around the logic behind our decisions to move on - I appreciated the experience and relationships that I was taking away from my time with BMA. Until recently…
On one of my recent return trips - I do reference my previous posts occasionally - I noticed that the author’s name had been changed on one of my posts. Curious, I looked up another. Same thing. It quickly became evident that the terms of my departure were worse than I had realized.
More than two years of my postings have now been attributed to other authors…
Primarily someone writing as “IsabellaSingerLo”. As far as I can tell, my name was simply changed in the database since I don’t see any posts by this author that I didn’t write. I had originally intended to list out the links in this post, but there’s just too many. Instead, you can find most of the altered posts archived here.
The situation begs an interestings question: I wrote those posts specifically for BMA, but I wrote them. Can it be considered plagarism? How much of that content is mine (or at least partly mine)? This is, of course, disappointing to say the least. Something just rubs me the wrong way about losing attribution for all of the thoughts and discussions that made up my education in blogging.
March 25th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Wow.. I dunno what to say here. (Brought here by POKE Exec @meat99 ).
I believe you wrote the content, and you gave the rights to profit, distribute, and republish the content to beyondmadisonavenue.com
However, the “you” in this process was changed, and I think that’s the problem.
Technically, I believe this is plagiarism–it’d be called plagiarism if you provided text to your boss, and your boss erased your name and placed his own on there.
Even if your contract said it became property of the company, it’s a form of awkward libel by the company to credit these texts to someone who didn’t write them.
I’m sure there’s something you can do, but maybe it’s for the best you’ve left. This kind of stuff is an act of desperation, I’m sure.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Danny I noticed something similar on a trip back there a few months ago. To be honest, the entire blog looks like it’s pretty much unkept. I visited a few of my old posts and noticed that there were usually several spam comments left, that no one had thought to moderate. I actually went back and took a few of my posts (interviews I did on BMA), and reposted them on The Viral Garden, but noted that they were originally published on BMA.
I really think the entire blog reflects more poorly on Talent Zoo than it does anyone else. It just looks like they don’t care enough to keep their blog ‘clean’. The part about no longer attributing us as authors of our work is really silly, but I noticed they’ve also screwed up the formatting on many of the older posts as well.
I dunno what the answer is. I think it’s silly what they are doing, but it just makes them look bad, and like they don’t really care about BMA. Sad to see, because the blog at one time was a really great one, in my biased opinion
March 25th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
I’m not sure what the exact legalities of this are, but this is absolutely wrong. Even though you wrote the posts for the company, they were originally posted as your work. The other “writer” has absolutely no right to claim them as her own. This is morally, ethically, and almost definitely legally wrong. Hope that you get this issue resolved!
March 25th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
WTF? That’s bullshit. And not entirely surprising. I take that back - you would think it would be common sense to not just randomly swap author names. Crazy…