'The Register' seems to have plagiarised Mary Jo Foley

I was researching Microsoft's 'Midori' and 'Singularity' projects -- and noticed that two recent articles i found in the mainstream tech press were almost identical.

The first one was by Mary Jo Foley at ZD net, titled "More tech details emerge on Microsoft's 'Midori'"

The other article was at 'the register' titled "Microsoft to kill Windows with 'web-centric' Midori?" attributed to Kelly Fiveash, and it seemed to be an almost complete copy.

It's not just that both articles reference a particular SD times article (Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed)-- but they use the exact same sequence of quotes and the same sequence of key words and ideas is presented in both articles.

Here's one little example (that I forgot to highlight in the images).

MJF says:

"Midori is, indeed, a distributed operating system (harkening back to Microsoft's old "Cairo" project)."

While the register says:

"Midori is a distributed operating system that appears, in part, to contain elements of Microsoft's failed 'Cairo' and WinFS projects."

The Cairo reference is not in the article they are both citing -- it's something MJF thought of. So when the register says that this distributed OS "appears" to contain such an elemnt, they would do well to instead say "it appears to Mary Jo Foley" -- since it was she who made the observation. And I think in this case it's a mistaken observation, which makes the intellectual theft more obvious.

Maybe this is just typical in tech journalism -- i've never looked at it this closely before. Probably most journalism is just about recycling each other's work and this is no more blatant than any other case. Still -- pretty sad work.

'Peter Cooper' on Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:52:02 GMT, sez:

I'm sure you realize that nearly all of those similarities noted in your graphic are direct quotes from the SD Times. Is The Register meant to quote less interesting parts of the SD Times story or avoid quoting altogether to avoid "plagiarising" someone else?

Intriguingly, The Register article refers to "software plus services" whereas MJF's says "Software + Services" and The Register quotes an e-mail from Ballmer that the MJF story doesn't mention.

It would probably be wrong to say that there's little evidence the Register writer had seen MJF's article, but the similarities seem no more sinister than those between news outlets that got the same AP story over the wire. There's only so many ways of relaying the facts, and since most of the similarities you point out are quotations, it's no big deal.

'lb' on Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:06:21 GMT, sez:

@Peter - i'd like to believe that it's just a coincidence but the SD times article is so much longer and has so many more things in it, that there are many other interesting parts that would've been quoted had the work been non-derivative.

It really seems like the reporter from the register went "Oh this is too long, i'm bored reading it -- i'll just read MJF's summary".

Then she embellished two parts of it with tangents derived from her own article's over the last week or two.

'Don2' on Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:47:22 GMT, sez:

I think you're right, and the give away is the "Cairo" reference.

Singularity has nothing in common with Cairo. Cairo was taking Object Oriented concepts to the extreme, while singularity is taking Functional Programming concepts to the extreme.

So it's Mary Jo who has come up with this mistake. When the register blindly copy this mistake, they reveal that Mary Jo is their real source, not the SD times article.

This is similar to the way that map-makers would put tiny deliberate mistakes into their maps to reveal when competitors are copying their material.

Well done Leon. You've stumbled onto a smoking gun.

d2

'lb' on Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:11:59 GMT, sez:

In a different article at SD times, they are talking about Larry O'Brien (from Knowing.net) when they say:

"He noted that certain critics might draw parallels between the challenges of implementing some of the aforementioned scenarios and Microsoft's repeated failures to deliver its often-promised Cairo and WinFS distributed object-oriented file systems."

So maybe they did both derive the Cairo/WinFS angle from SD Times.

'lame' on Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:26:27 GMT, sez:

Seriously, WTF? How could someone possibly construe this as plagiarism? The comparison of identical quotes, as mentioned above, is laughable at best.

'lb' on Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:56:45 GMT, sez:

@lame:
maybe 'plagiarism' is too strong a word.

i think that Kelly Fiveash has taken all of the content from MJF's article, without referencing it.

You really have to look at the original article to see what's going on.

MJF has gone for her particular spin on it. Any other journalist, acting independently would've represented Midori different, and almost certainly extracted different portions of the text as quotes.

Also -- had Kelly Fiveash been quoting from the original article (rather than MJF's interpretation) she mightn't have made some of her particular blunders.

For example she says "according to the SD times report which cites internal microsoft documents, a team led by Eric Rudder..." -- but this is not what the original article says, this is a misinterpretation she (IMO) could only have gotten from reading MJF's article.

The "source" for that piece of info is not "internal microsoft documents" -- the SD times article clearly credits Mary Jo Foley, who has published that info in her book, Microsoft 2.0.

So this kind of pointer reinforces my opinion that Kelly has taken the content from MJF without attribution.

lb

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