If I wrote it for you, how much of it belongs to me?
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
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.
