The Value of Content

I received an email tonight from Chris at Part Time Poker informing me that the submitted story I posted here titled History of Texas Hold’em was stolen from his site. Not wanting to jump to conclusions I emailed James Hatfield from The Absolute Nuts asking him to clarify. Before Chris James could answer in full James Chris pointed out that several of the articles from The Absolute Nuts appeared stolen.

I checked this out and the most recent post on The Absolute Nuts is an article titled “Starting Hand Nicknames.” I cut and paste the first paragraph and put it into Google and saw the same exact article, word for word, on About.com written by Bill Burton.

The second story on his site, WSOP- History, I did the same and found the same exact story on Poker.com. No author is attributed to this story on Poker.com’s website.

The third story on his site about the death of John Bonetti was word for word copied from the Telegraph.co.uk. Again, no author attributed to the story on the Telegraph.co.uk website.

The next post on his blog about Michael Phelps was word for word the same article on The Australian written by Ben English.

Mr. Hatfield has given no credit to any source. He claims he didn’t know he had to link back to the original source. I can only assume Mr. Hatfield has never written a report in his academic life. Even in primary school they require you to cite your sources in the footnotes or bibliography.

I really wish I could attribute this to an oversight or perhaps even a misunderstanding of copyright law but when someone repeatedly uses copyrighted material without making any reference back to the original source . . . well, that just seems intentional. I mean, there’s not even a “I saw this on . . .” sort of identifier that this work isn’t his.

Mr. Hayfield says on his website:

First thing Id like to say to all that have read my Blog is that I am sorry. I was unaware that i had to include links to site if Used other sites information I will do better in the future. I have since removed all post that did not include a link. Once again I am sorry. They may be re posted in the future with credit given to the original author. I did not mean to offend or cheat anyone

James T Hatfield

I wish I could accept that at face value but James intentionally tried to mislead me. When I go back to our communications prior to posting the article, his first email to me said:

yes i would love to write for you as well anything to get more people to my site

“I would love to write for you” pretty much indicates that he was attempting to have me believe that what he was sending me was his own work.

He sent me an article and then sent me another email shortly after with a subject line “sory i messed up the first draft heres another.” Again, the use of the word draft is meant to imply that he was making revisions to something he wrote. The revision he was making here was that he only copy and pasted part of the original article. He had left off several of the last few paragraphs and his follow up email was simply to include those chopped off paragraphs.

Sorry, but this is one of those pet peeves of mine. I get tired of seeing the words I’ve written on other people’s sites without so much as an attempt to give credit. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve run across Proof That Online Poker is Rigged on message boards and other websites where someone is attempting to take credit for my work.

All of this reminds me of a great quote:

If I plagiarize, it’s only because I like someone else’s idea better than mine and I want credit for it. Anna Chin-Williams

Fortunately, Chris from Part Time Poker has no problem with his article being posted here as long as it’s been properly attributed (which it is now). I would like to thank Chris for his understanding in all of this.