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A Podcast Covering Friday News Dumps

A journalist discovered that copying and pasting text from a public legal document uploaded to Scribd changed the font size in an attempt to deter plagiarism. However, the news editor who uploaded the document to be used in a report said he did not take any measures to restrict copying and wanted to provide broader access. An alternative service called DocumentCloud does not focus on plagiarism prevention and recognizes that attempts to restrict copying on the internet generally do not work, as transmitting text is the basic purpose of the internet.

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49 views1 page

A Podcast Covering Friday News Dumps

A journalist discovered that copying and pasting text from a public legal document uploaded to Scribd changed the font size in an attempt to deter plagiarism. However, the news editor who uploaded the document to be used in a report said he did not take any measures to restrict copying and wanted to provide broader access. An alternative service called DocumentCloud does not focus on plagiarism prevention and recognizes that attempts to restrict copying on the internet generally do not work, as transmitting text is the basic purpose of the internet.

Uploaded by

Sephit
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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While reviewing a public legal document to prepare for a podcast covering Friday news

dumps, I cut and pasted a couple of lines I wanted to paraphrase. The document had been
uploaded to the digital document site Scribd. My on-screen text was normal size, but
cutting and pasting into a text document changed the font and size to 104 Comic Sans MS
in a text editor or 78 Comic Sans MS in a Word doc. (Try it yourself.)
A Scribd spokesperson reached via email said: “We've had many requests from our
uploaders to make it more difficult for readers to copy and paste original content. These
measures may appear differently, depending on the document and program you're pasting
into.” The reason? “To deter plagiarism.”
I reached out to Heavy.com news editor Tom Cleary, who’d downloaded the document in
question from PACER, a service that provides public access to federal court documents,
and uploaded it to be used in a colleague’s report on the ruling. Cleary said he didn’t take
any special measures to make the document difficult to copy. “Since it's a public court
document I wasn't concerned about [plagiarism],” he told me. He said he didn’t believe
he’d changed any settings when uploading the document, and was unaware that cutting and
pasting the document changed the font size. “We're trying to give more people access to
source documents when we upload them, not restrict it. So it wasn't my intention to make it
harder for people to quote from it or use it themselves,” he said.

Frankly, keeping people from copying things is not a strategy that's worked super well for
the internet from its earliest days up until right now.
If you want to avoid inconveniencing readers who just want to cut and paste from a public
document for you can choose to upload documents to an alternative service, like
DocumentCloud. Right now it's used primarily by journalists who report on or publish
primary source documents, though the platform is also giving accounts (on a trial basis) to
those who work with public in related industries. Aspiring users must apply for an account.
"Plagiarism is not our primary concern," said Ted Han, DocumentCloud's technology lead.
"Frankly, keeping people from copying things is not a strategy that's worked super well for
the internet from its earliest days up until right now. Sure, you can be a nuisance to people
who are copying text out of a document, but this is literally what the internet is for—to
transmit text. It's going to be challenging for anyone—whether they're in the right or not—
to prevent people from doing so."

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