I try to be very careful about plagiarism. You may have noticed this with my photos; I prefer to use a photo that I've taken, and in absence of that, I attempt to find a photo which is either distributable under creative commons license, or for which I can contact the author and take a minute to ask them if I can have permission to use it. I've contact many of the ABL teams and they have graciously agreed to let me borrow their photos. But I always give credit back to the source if it's not either my own photo or in the public domain.
I try to do the same with my writing. Preferably, I could give you all-original content all the time; as often as I can, I like to give readers a unique angle on things that they can't get from the rest of the baseball prospect blogging world. That's not always possible, however. A lot of times I will end up paraphrasing things that other people have written. I usually do this if I read a lot of different sources and just want to briefly sum up the general trend. Sometimes I feel like this is kind of borderline and I will at least try to use words like "people say", etc. to make it apparent that these aren't my own observations, or whatever. In that case, though, the writing is 100% mine even if I'm going on second-hand info. Sometimes I do lift a sentence or paragraph whole out of something someone else wrote, but to me, that is a black and white scenario: if a writer is going to directly copy another person's sentence, that writer really needs to attribute the source (and if possible, it's courteous to provide a link back). I would never, under any circumstances, lift a full paragraph of text directly out of another writer's blog without linking back to them or at least stating the name of the place I got it from. I also admit that I am new to blogging and new to covering baseball, so if anyone feels that I'm not doing enough, please let me know. I take this very seriously and I want to make everything about this blog as legit as possible, and I am not afraid of constructive criticism. The last thing I want to do is make anyone feel that I've ripped them off.
Apparently, however, some people feel that it's OK to do that to me. I was doing a little research on Garrett Wittels today and I came across this page on a website called Baseball Rumor Mill. As I started to read the text, I thought to myself "This sounds really familiar. It almost sounds like something I would write." Well, guess what? I did write that. This website, Baseball Rumor Mill, has lifted an entire paragraph word-for-word off my blog and posted it on their site without attribution.
I am very clear about what I expect from people who use my work. I have no problem sharing my work with anyone else. All I ask is that you link back to me if you use it on the web, and if that's not possible, state the address of the website. Somehow note that it came from 49thStateHardball.com, and while you're at it, drop me a line and let me know where it's going. That's all I want. If there is some circumstance where that's not feasible, we can work something else out...just ask me. Any ABL team is welcome to use anything I write on here however they want, because you guys have hooked me up so much already that I owe you. If anyone else wants to use my writing or photos and for some reason doesn't want to link to me, just ask. Maybe we can work out another deal. Buy me a six-pack. Whatever. All I'm saying is that, while I'm glad to share my ideas and work with you, I don't think it's cool for you to take my work without asking and claim that it's yours.
I don't know how to feel about this. Part of me is, frankly, a little pissed off. Should I say something? Should I try to do something about this? Should I be flattered that they would like my little blurb enough to want to steal it? On the one hand, I feel like it might not get me anywhere and wouldn't be worth the trouble. I'm probably not the first one they've ripped off, maybe this site is the baseball version of eBaum's World and no amount of complaining will do any good. Maybe I'm taking myself too seriously. But part of me still feels like I've been wronged and that I should stand up for myself lest the blogging world get the impression that I'm an exploitable mark and my blog is fertile grounds for raping and pillaging.
Wherever I end up going with this, I want to be clear on something. I wrote that paragraph. It would be absolutely ridiculous for someone down the road to notice this same thing, and try to turn it around and say that I'm the one being a thief here. So I want to clear that up right now. I wrote that paragraph first. They're the ones ripping me off. At the very least, I wanted to get that out in the open.
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