#rainwater #OWS #innovation #freedomofinformation #sustainability @OccupyWallSt @erinvollick

It's Plagiarizing Cats and Dogs...

Recently, Erin Vollick, novelist and self-titled post-modern scholar, found herself a victim of plagiarism when she found an article she'd written had been nicked and re-published in on a UK engineering blog as though it was their own.  Unamazed, her reaction was simply to dryly celebrate that her Canadian article had crossed the pond on its own several-thousand-letter feet.

Vollick, obviously, is not silly and knows that having something nicked on the internet is like having a boy put a spider in your lunchbox in third grade; it's a compliment, in a way.  It means they like you.

So good on Vollick.  Her blood-pressure stayed down, her hair remained in her head, and the heart attack was averted.  Wise.

I, however, find the practice of re-posting articles by websites who had no hand in their creation extremely tiresome.  Last week, while addressing an element in my manuscript that required knowing when Bolivia's Cochabamba water wars ended (April 11, 2000 - Happy anniversary, Óscar Olivera!), I came across a related article regarding American prohibition of rainwater collection in certain states.  Intrigued, I read it, feeling the familiar and satisfying rush that follows the discovery of anything else corporate America is doing wrong (Go, Occupy Wall Street! Go!).

Fueled by righteous indignation and a desire to rescue millions of home gardeners from certain prosecution and imprisonment, I attempted to look further into the matter with the help of Detective Google.  Well, about thirty combinations of words later such as, rainwater, catchment, laws, states, America, and legal, I found not the heap of beleaguered Americans fighting for the right to sustainably keep their carrots and tomatoes from dying of thirst, but page after page of re-published copies of the one, same, original article (try it!).  One of the most recent re-postings (March 24, 2011) was, disappointingly, posted by http://occupythe99percent.com, despite the fact that upon checking the facts in the article, one can easily discover that much of the information is outdated.

In the article, a link is presented to this video, which features the plight of a Utah car dealer, Mark Miller, who was prevented from using captured rainwater to wash his cars because the rain reportedly belonged to the state, even though it fell on his property.  Shocking as it is, the video linked above was posted back in 2008 - four years ago.  Eventually, I stumbled onto HarvestH2O, which contains more updated information and links to specific legislation and state water websites, and I quickly discovered that Utah approved Senate Bill 32 on May 11, 2010, making it legal for its citizens to collect rainwater without a water right by simply registering with the Division of Water Rights, a process for which there is no fee.

The damage of the treatment of the rainwater article is twofold:

First, the article acts as an catchment pool for anyone eager and inclined to denounce corporate America.  Unfortunately, many of the people in this pool don't bother to check the validity of whatever satisfies their eagerness and go on to tweet, post, blog, re-publish, email, like, recommend, and share it.  This carpet bombing of social media leads to the same result for informed progressives as banner ads and pop-ups lead to for the products they advertise: they all get tuned out.

Second, as mentioned above, this mass confusion makes it very difficult to get accurate information on the whos, whats, whens, wheres and the whys at the heart of any matter in question.  If we relate it to our rainwater article, we find that because of the number of times it has been re-posted, it's nearly impossible to find out the original author, publisher, or date of publication.  Now, it's perfectly possible that each state is, as suggested on the HarvestH2O site, working furiously towards environmental sustainability and the rights of the individual to harvest rainwater.  What's also possible is that the confusion and wealth of outdated information allows interest groups to influence policy makers in a much more furtive manner.  After all, if you can't find the policy, how do you know who stands to gain and who stands to lose from it?

I'm not, of course, suggesting that corporate underhandedness is the final conclusion we should draw from this example of careless re-publication.  Instead, I'm simply proposing that the above scenario does a disservice to the freedom of information.  While it's common practice, it's not common sense.  The article, in seeking to shed light on the subject of rainwater collection, actually ended up shooting it in the soggy foot.

So, what's the solution?

Well, being barely competent at using Twitter and Facebook, I doubt I am the person to invent a way of watermarking words, but if some innovator happens to stumble across this blog post and thinks himself or herself capable of creating such a thing, the internet could be a made a more reliable place.  Surely, with Google's ability to recognize groups of words, some method of locking an original article and preventing or otherwise regulating its re-publication elsewhere should be possible.  Or perhaps it already exists and isn't simply common knowledge?

The internet is too valuable a tool to have such Achilles' heels.

A. Crow