I’ve been a keen follower of Pamela Jones’ editorial on the SCO-IBM case for a number of years now, mainly because of the importance of the topic but also because of Pamela’s straightforward and factual journalism style. Whether or not this is her real persona has never been an issue with me because her facts speak for themselves. I think the rest of the Groklaw community as well as the media at large would agree with me. Certainly a lot of the facts unearthed at Groklaw have assisted both the public at large, and the legal community I dare say, understand what was really going on with SCO in their attempt at coercing IBM into paying up for misappropriation of rights to code that SCO didn’t even own.
This draws a parallel to a particular nasty journalism issue that has reared its ugly head, partly as an indirect result of the SCO case itself. Unauthorized use of bloggers’ and journalists’ published work without notification, compensation or … ( Could this be termed plagiarism? Not really, as there a publisher’s work is indicated as being from someone else. )
The story starts with Maureen O Gara’s column LinuxGram for LinuxWorld Magazine where she went about trying to expose the true identity of Pamela Jones and then draw some link between her and IBM which would be regarded as unethical and cast doubt on IBM’s stance with regards to the SCO lawsuit. Notwithstanding the fact that nothing of great importance was unearthed ( original article here ), MOG was adamant in her view that there was some sort of collusion between PJ and IBM. Besides SCO and MOG, no one else agreed, the article was deemed to have been in very poor taste and the publisher Sys-con removed the story. The removal however had more to do with the fact that Sys-con’s sites were experiencing a DDOS attack rather than a desire to distance themselves from MOG. You can gather from this interview with Sys-con’s CEO, Fuat Kircaali, that they didn’t think they were in the wrong. In fact Kircaali takes a fairly unapologetic stance in the interview which brings into serious question how the privacy of bloggers and journalists is viewed by publishers. Ultimately this led to the resignation of all LinuxWorld staff.
This in itself is not the crux of this article but rather a recent blog by Aral Balkan describing Sys-con’s unethical behaviour w.r.t. their publishing of authors’ articles without those authors’ permission. Sys-con, according to the blog, misappropriates authors’ identities in indicating they are a Sys-con Media authors and publishes articles by these authors without their permission. A number of other high profile IT presences appear to have been subsumed by Sys-con including Tim O Reilly and Matt Cutts from Google. There were even website domains in the form of author.ulitzer.com. These domains now redirect to the Ulitzer site ( seemingly a Sys-con Media offshoot; Kircaali is CEO of both ) which promotes itself as “BusinessWeek, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and Condé Nast Traveler will be replaced by Ulitzer.” Wow, that is pretentious and grandiose …
So I did some further digging and came up with some interesting articles from a variety of sources regarding Sys-con. Aral Balkan appears to not be the only one who has suffered at the hands of Sys-con. Boycottnovell have been complaining about Sys-con for some time. Brandon Harper indicates he has had issues with Sys-con in relation to the Coldfusion Developers Journal ( CFDJ ) published by Sys-con. Scott Rose, a writer for International Yacht Vacations and Charters ( another Sys-con magazine ), has had difficulties getting payment for submitted articles. Angsuman Chakraborty talks about forced podcast feeds when visiting the Sys-con websites. Keith Peters had more damning things to say about Sys-con’s unauthorised reproduction of content.
The list goes on and on and on …
I’m not making any predictions on this matter here and would rather let the reports of others guide you in your dealings with Sys-con and use of their media. The ease of publishing data on the Internet these days does make it very easy to plagiarise or reuse content without permission. And it’s a constant threat whenever an author/blogger decides to release a piece of information expounding their views on whatever subjects they are interested in. However, the Internet will always retain a view of itself and be available as proof should those who are aggrieved, need evidence of wrongdoing and a means to right the wrongs against themselves. The community stands by you too.
Update: Ted Neward writing in JavaWorld has just indicated his content has been purloined as well.
