Make it four:

Glenn Greenwald in Salon: Major troop reductions imminent - again

Mark Mitchell in Embryoyo: Fool Me Forty-Nine Times, Shame on Me...

So who is this Mitchell guy?

Posted May 30, 2007 11:44 AM by Susan

Any idea why the plagarism? Is he looking to sell ads? Is this a splog site?

The change in titles suggest it's handmade plagarism and not just datascraping.

Posted May 30, 2007 11:47 AM by Kathryn Cramer

Wow. That's just, kinda, astounding.

Does it say something positive about my outlook on humanity that I'm actually surprised?

And I second Susan: Who is this guy?

Posted May 30, 2007 11:50 AM by Angelle

Yowsa! Dude, it's the internet. People can SEE you!

Posted May 30, 2007 11:50 AM by Chris S.

Looks like there may be others as well.

Posted May 30, 2007 11:51 AM by Julie

Kathryn Cramer at #2 wrote:

> Any idea why the plagarism? Is he looking to sell ads? Is this a splog site?

No sign of ads - it looks for all the world like a normal blog full of decent quality articles about political and social issues.

I don't see an income stream here. Resume boosting? Or the worlds saddest form of ego boosting?

Posted May 30, 2007 11:53 AM by Steve Taylor

If anyone else feels like grabbing timestamped screenshots, go right ahead.

Susan, good catch. I was typing them into Movable Type as fast as Jim was finding them.

Posted May 30, 2007 11:53 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

And another one. This time he removed a few sentences here and there.

Greenwald in Salon: Wolfowitz agrees to quit

Mitchell in Embryoyo: Hungry Like The Wolf

Screens captured; where do you want the images?

Posted May 30, 2007 11:56 AM by Susan

Same guy?

Posted May 30, 2007 11:57 AM by Amber

I almost get the sense that he's not so much malicious as he is unclear on the concept of blogging.

Posted May 30, 2007 11:57 AM by Howard Peirce

Not only will readers spot this sort of thing, but smart writers can make use of google alerts to be automatically alerted of plagarization. It's real simple -- copy and paste a distinctive sentence from each article you write and have google alerts tell you if it shows up elsewhere. Very efficient.

I catch a person or two a month this way, mostly bloggers who are shocked! shocked, I tell you! to get an e-mail from me.

I am not at all surprised by Theresa's post ... this sort of thing is rampant.

Posted May 30, 2007 11:58 AM by Leva

Sorry, that last should have been Leonard in Salon.

Having a little too much fun here.

Not sure how to timestamp, but working on it.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:02 PM by Susan

Clueless, maybe. Thirty seconds with Google turned up another one:
David Blaine Wants To Jump Off Brooklyn Bridge The good news: professional dumb-stuff doer (Mitchell)

The good news: professional dumb stuff-doer (AV Club)

Posted May 30, 2007 12:03 PM by P J Evans

Amber:

Given the Salt Lake City connection, I'd bet on it.

He just does not LEARN, eh?

Posted May 30, 2007 12:04 PM by Susan

Howard @ #10: I dunno. Mitchell's Embryoyo page is pretty slick looking for someone who is too "unclear on the concept of blogging." Granted, he may have a decent design sense and no other sense at all, but...

My mind is boggling. Loudly.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:05 PM by Madeleine Robins

Howard @ #10: I dunno. Mitchell's Embryoyo page is pretty slick looking for someone who is "unclear on the concept of blogging." Granted, he may have a decent design sense and no other sense at all, but...

My mind is boggling. Loudly.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:06 PM by Madeleine Robins

Drat. Sorry for the duplication.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:07 PM by Madeleine Robins

We were just saying we needed a new game.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:08 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Amber (#9), thanks for that link. I'd wager it is the same guy, as he makes it clear that Embryoyo is a Utah-based page. I retract comment 10.

Mark Mitchell is clearly a pioneer mapping out new topologies in Malice-Incompetence space.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:10 PM by Howard Peirce

Y'know, if you follow Amber's link you can get the email address of the reporter who wrote that article...

I've got the full screen captures with the time in the corner now.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:11 PM by Susan

The entry of Seriously, They're Making a Fucking Sims Movie? is ripped straight from SERIOUSLY, THEY'RE MAKING A F&@#ING SIMS MOVIE? at Chud.com. Though this time he did at least swap out one Sims screenshot for another; I'll give him credit for making sure to find a Sims screenshot, and not a Sims 2 one.

At this point, I'm thinking the greater challenge would be in finding an article on the blog that isn't ripped from somewhere else.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:16 PM by Fade Manley

Looks like the reporter has graduated, at least from this.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:16 PM by Angelle

The very first post at Embryoyo seems to be this one (dated 16 May 2007), which seems to be remarkably similar to this post at MySpace dated 22 March 2007.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:16 PM by James D. Macdonald

Ah, but that My Space post is by "Mark" in Salt Lake City. The next question is, did he really write that one?

Posted May 30, 2007 12:20 PM by beth meacham

You know what's sad? He's probably thrilled to see his page views climbing this morning; little does he know it's to seal his doom. *cackling whilst screenshooting*

Posted May 30, 2007 12:20 PM by Angelle

"One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame...."

Posted May 30, 2007 12:21 PM by albatross

The second-oldest entry is a direct rip of Bob Harris at TMW.

James@23: I think that's actually this guy's MySpace blog. If so, he's a location match with the Mark Mitchell fired from the Daily Utah Chronicle.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:26 PM by Aaron M

This is a nice detective game, but let's remember that there's a real human being at the other end of it.

Finding examples of plagiarism and stomping on them? I'm all for it, though not just at the moment (I have a Dutch class to go to). Piling on the guy who did it, past the point of memorable instruction? Not so much.

Not saying we're doing anything wrong. I'm just worried that we'll sour our discourse. And we don't really need that right now.

Ignore me if I'm being a worrywart.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:26 PM by abi

I was about to point out the Chud ripoff, but somebody beat me to it. (My personal money was on it being a Kotaku/Joystiq ripoff, but I was pretty certain it wasn't his.)

The thing is....he may have posts of his own in there, but now every single one of 'em is suspect to me. Even if I enjoyed his very own writing style, I would never really take it for being all his own ever again. Kinda sad.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:29 PM by PiscusFiche

Ugh, Typepad's policy on copyright infringement is the same DMCA-compliant crap that Google goes by.

Which is to say that they don't care unless the copyright holder sends them a bunch of documentation in the mail, even if the plagiarism is blatantly obvious.

Yes, I'm a little angry about spam blogs stealing my posts so they can slap AdSense ads on top, and the amount of work that appears to be involved in getting Google to revoke their account.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:31 PM by Audrey

Audrey: You might try adjusting your RSS feed from whole posts to excerpts only. That has dramatically diminished the spam blog theft from my site.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:37 PM by Amber

#23:

That was first written by Cintra Wilson. It was published in her book "A Massive Swelling : Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease" in 2000.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:38 PM by Dom

P J Evans (13), could you try those links again?

Posted May 30, 2007 12:41 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

He's either started to take them down or we're overloading the server.

Anyone found out if that promising young reporter found another journalism job somewhere and would like to do a reprise?

Posted May 30, 2007 12:42 PM by Sisuile

Should we denounce him on his comments page? Alert the originals?

Posted May 30, 2007 12:43 PM by Xopher

He's deleting them as I watch, this morning, after I posted a comment commending him on his bravery in continuing to post despite half the internet breaking into his computer and stealing his writing before he could post the originals.

I think it's funny.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:47 PM by John R

He's already taken down two of the ones you've identified.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:48 PM by Jill

That is just plain... weird.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:49 PM by Greg London

In fact, this is the comment I made, originally:

Awfully interesting thing: PZ Myers over at ScienceBlogs.com appears to have copied your article! Word for word! Punctuation by punctuation! Link by link!

How horrible... and PZ even appears to have done it *the day before* you posted yours. Why, the fiend must have broken into your computer and stolen your draft version! And your writing sounds so much like PZ's that nobody might ever have noticed PZ taking your article at all, if you hadn't bravely continued to post your original.

We're all fortunate that you possess the strength and character it takes to deal so effectively with other people posting your articles in the days before you yourself do, taking the high road and not even commenting at all on their crime, simply letting your words stand for themselves.

An yes, I did mean the plural "articles". After all, look at what Glenn Greenwald did with this other piece of yours! And there's more! In fact, trivially googling shows me that four of the last five of your posts have been stolen, word for word, by other bloggers who have then posted them hours or days before you posted them yourself! And the fifth? Well, all the others have been cruelly stolen from you, why not that one, too? You should check further!

And you should probably take your computer to the shop, install a firewall, get it scanned by a professional, etc. Everyone's posting all your work before you do, that MUST mean your computer is compromised!

Posted May 30, 2007 12:50 PM by John R

All of his comments are closed.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:53 PM by Jon Meltzer

He does seem to be fond of ripping off Salon: beside the examples mentioned earlier, his May 24 "Murderous Vegans" is taken from Carol Lloyd's May 24 Salon column of the same title. I haven't checked whether it's an exact copy or has been reconfigured, but I didn't spot any obvious divergence.

At this point, I'm assuming that any item on that blog is most likely lifted from somewhere else.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:53 PM by John Mark Ockerbloom

Embroyoyo is now completely empty. It happened as I watched.

I wonder what he was thinking to do this?

Posted May 30, 2007 12:55 PM by Steve Taylor

His Murderous Vegans

Salon's Carol Lloyd's Murderous Vegans

He's lucky he wasn't more widely read (most of his 'posts' have 0 comments) or people might take his little transgression more seriously. Like lawsuit seriously.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:56 PM by Angelle

Looking at Technorati, his blog is 14 days old and has no authority yet- no links at all.

In comparison, ML on Technorati has an authority of 1400 (1) and a rank of 1200 (2).

Seems to me like he wanted to jump-start his blog. Too bad he connected the cable clamp to the gas tank.

----
(1) a function of the number of links (?).
(2) overall rank of all blogs. Here's their top 100 blogs

Posted May 30, 2007 12:58 PM by Kathryn from Sunnyvale

#42: He has to be reading this thread. Right now.

Posted May 30, 2007 12:59 PM by Jon Meltzer

Looks like the whole site's down.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:00 PM by James D. Macdonald

I couldn't find one for the SLC movie going article, as none of the distinctive phrases turned up anything. But....him being an SLC resident, I can actually see that commentary being his own. (It's just that now I have a little voice in the back of my head wondering if he "borrowed" it from a friend's commentary or otherwise.)

Posted May 30, 2007 1:00 PM by PiscusFiche

And it's gone, the entire blog is gone.

That was fun while it lasted.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:01 PM by John R

The MySpace account is now down, as is the user "Mark in Salt Lake City".

He must be reading Making Light, right now, and deleting as fast as we post.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:11 PM by Jon Meltzer

im in ur blogz, citin ur plagerizmz.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:13 PM by Greg London

Blog exorcism: "the power of TNH compels you".

Posted May 30, 2007 1:14 PM by Martin Wisse

Next step is for him to appear here, either under his own name or as a sockpuppet, to denounce us as horrible meanies who smeared one of the Truly Good Guys.

For the people who came in late, here are some screen shots:

Seriously, they're making a fucking Sims movie?

And the original.

Fool Me Forty-Nine Times....

And the original.

Creation Wins!!!

And the original.

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

And the original.

...And After Everything We Did For Them!

And the original.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:18 PM by James D. Macdonald

Google has a couple of posts cached here and here.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:18 PM by Susan

#51: It would be better if we could still see the, uh, "original" postings - but disemvoweled.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:22 PM by Jon Meltzer

im in ur pinata, eatin ur candy

Posted May 30, 2007 1:23 PM by Fiendish Writer

Teresa, should I try those links again now, if he's disappeared his site? (Those were straight out of Google when I put them up.)

Posted May 30, 2007 1:23 PM by P J Evans

Well now, that was fast. I await the arrival of the sockpuppets.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:25 PM by beth meacham

The "Cocksucker Blues" posts:

At Embryoyo and at MySpace.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:26 PM by James D. Macdonald

Veering off-topic, I agree with the WT@%%$???! over a movie based on The Sims,which isn't very narrative. It's more like playing with a dollhouse. Maybe this is all a big misunderstanding and the movie is actually going to be an updated version of Ibsen in which gaming leads Nora to recognize the emptiness of her RL and leave Torvald.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:28 PM by moon_custafer

I can actually see interesting ways of making a Sims movie: take a look at The Strangerhood, where someone did an entire narrative based on being stuck inside a Sims-logic world via the game engine. There are implied or explicit storylines in existing characters, there's plenty of weirdness to go around... It's still something of a dollhouse, but it's a dollhouse that suggests various types of stories. Done right, it could be very The Truman Show.

But, assuming the project actually exists, it probably won't be. It's probably just someone going "Hey, this game sells outrageous quantities! Quick, sell the movie rights before the person who bought them figures out what the game actually is!"

Posted May 30, 2007 1:38 PM by Fade Manley

Abi (28), before I did anything else, I posted a brief, neutral comment to Embryoyo, telling Mitchell I recognized the Greenwalt article.

As Kathryn said (2), this looks like handmade plagiarism, not datascraping. I think Mark Mitchell is the kind of human being who either doesn't understand that plagiarism is wrong, or doesn't understand that some people promiscuously remember text, or both.

I've known they exist since I was in high school, when I occasionally helped out with English Dept. round-robin readings of student poetry-writing journals. (I think I've written about this before on Making Light. If so, please forgive the duplication.) As soon as a teacher recognized one plagiarism in a poetry journal, the whole thing would get passed around the English office for further identification.

If I hadn't done that, I would have had trouble believing there were students who thought their English teachers wouldn't recognize standard chestnuts of English verse -- or, having recognized one, suspect that other poems in their journal might be lifted as well.

Is this guy the same Mark Mitchell who got fired from the Daily Utah Chronicle? We don't know for sure. If it is (or even if it isn't), this guy needs to learn that whether or not he agrees that plagiarism is wrong, other people think it is, and they will catch him at it. Better to learn that now, in an obscure blog, than in some later and more catastrophic circumstance.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:40 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Bah, I miss all of the fun. Though if the sockpuppet brigade does arrive....

Posted May 30, 2007 1:41 PM by Stephen Granade

Update, 1:00 p.m.: Sometime in the last half hour, Embryoyo went down.

Breathtaking.

Promise me you'll only use your powers for good, y'all?

Posted May 30, 2007 1:43 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Oh, they'll make the Sims movie all right. And they'll make a sequel. I'm guessing the sequel will be all about the sons of the Sims families in the first movie, and be called Sons of Sims, or maybe...

...oh wait.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:45 PM by Xopher

Do you think Embryoyo just got slashdotted, or did he want to hide the evidence?

Posted May 30, 2007 1:47 PM by Xopher

Back around 12:30 I noticed that a lot of links earlier in this thread were getting "page not found" messages. Looks like someone is trying to hide the crimes, not realizing that screen captures and data dumps make such attempts impossible in the world of the Internet.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:49 PM by John

I await the arrival of the sockpuppets.

Seen this ritual before, have we? Heh.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:51 PM by Kathryn Cramer

(whiiiine) Two hours is not a long enough game. I can make a croquet game last longer than that!

Also, I have another pair of screen caps. Anyone want to give me an address to submit screencaps to for archiving? I feel left out.

Now we need a new game.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:52 PM by Susan

#65: In real time, we saw the comments closed, then the blog removed, then the myspace account closed. Slashdotting just isn't credible.

Posted May 30, 2007 1:54 PM by Jon Meltzer

im in ur blogz, citin ur plagerizmz.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:06 PM by Anonymous Plagiarist

This was the MySpace message I sent Mark in Salt Lake City earlier:

Subject: Son, the internet caught you with your pants down

You've taken down your typepad blog. Probably for the best.

If you want to be a writer, or even if you don't, stop stealing other people's work and trying to pass it off as your own.

The internet is watching.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:06 PM by Angelle

A little googling shows that the story of the Chronicle writer was picked up by regrettheerror.com (a blog dedicated to retractions, faulty reporting, etc) and from there has made its way as far as an Indian site reporting on plagiarism in the US. This drives it home that anything that makes its way on to the web leaves a nearly indelible trail somewhere. Alas for Mark Mitchell, as people are going to be googling "Mark Mitchell" Utah" and turning that up for some time.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:09 PM by PiscusFiche

I go to renew my truck's tags, and you all find the prey, hunt it down, and tree it before I get back, all in that short space of time. I agree with Nicole, in #63.

It's always possible that he checked out this site generally, and then decided that sockpuppets would be a bad idea. Not likely*, but I'm just saying.

*In fact, it would probably be the first time for that, but stranger things have happened.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:13 PM by fidelio

I'm sorry, Fidelio. We already ate all the candy.

There's a more substantial game one post down, where Abi, Ajay, and the rest of the crew are writing LOLcat poetry and and other pastiches.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:19 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

It doth seem so strange.

Honestly, how could anyone have thought he'd get away with that at all, let alone for any length of time? So much material, sooner or later, someone had to notice.

Seriously, it looks like he was only running for a few weeks, in fact, before someone actually did... And if the goal had been to get readers/citations, that would only have been self-defeating... soon as his profile rose, he'd get nailed for sure. He probably only made it as long as he did because no one was reading it.

Truly, truly strange.

Wild theory time: was he trying to impress someone in his personal life? Someone who might not read that much of the net? Someone who maybe hadn't heard about him getting fired from that paper?

Man, if you're reading this: just write your own stuff...

I mean, even if you've nothing to say, and have hardly a single original idea in your noggin, (a) that describes most of the bloggers in the world, anyway, and (b) in Hollywood, they call that marketability.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:20 PM by AJ Milne

Email link for Anonymous Plagiarist, #70, appears to go to goatse. (google it if you haven't heard of it, but for god's sake not as an image search). Also, the comment itself plagiarizes Greg clever LOLism, up above, but I suppose that could be a meta-joke from a real ML commentor.

#55 may also be bogus.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:22 PM by Mary Dell spots a rude email link

Holy shit. That was quick.

Dude, what were you thinking?

Posted May 30, 2007 2:24 PM by Lizzy L

"View all by" tells me I'm wrong about #55 (but not about #70). Sorry, Fiendish Writer!

Posted May 30, 2007 2:25 PM by Mary Dell

Mary (#76): this fiendish writer understands why you might suspect them, but they are truly not a bogus person.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:29 PM by Fiendish Writer

Mary (#76): this fiendish writer understands why you might suspect them, but they are truly not a bogus person.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:30 PM by Fiendish Writer

#74. That's all right, Teresa, the thread arising from abi's poem is high-density chocolate enough.
Between Dunbar pastiches and the Dante text adventure, it'll be a while before I stop snickering. I'm mostly just set back by the the extreme speed of events in this thread.

How was Kansas City? Were you and Patrick able to absorb enough local cuisine to fend off barbecue deficit for a while?

Posted May 30, 2007 2:33 PM by fidelio

Mary: No problem!

Teresa: Groveling apologies for the sillinesss of duplicate posting.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:33 PM by Fiendish Writer

Man, you turn your back for an hour and the world changes. Gone? All of it? But it was so instructive, in such a depressing way.

The power of Making Light is truly awesome. Wonder if he's sitting in his room with the lights off, shivering.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:57 PM by Madeleine Robins

Mary Dell: the Anonymous Plagiarist at #70 is just having fun being very meta- ... so I am assured.

Posted May 30, 2007 2:58 PM by Charlie Stross

Just wondering, was the blog's name a red flag? Googling "Embryoyo" returns several results for a poetry book by Dean Young. Could Mark Mitchell not even come up with his own name for his blog?

Posted May 30, 2007 3:49 PM by Matthew

The duplication of "yo" in the blog name might imply a bounceback -- I'm stretching here, but I wonder if it was a weird social experiment to see how soon he'd be caught plagiarizing?

Posted May 30, 2007 4:08 PM by Linkmeister

#86: It's a book title.

Posted May 30, 2007 4:37 PM by Jon Meltzer

Agh, missed comment #85. My apologies.

Posted May 30, 2007 4:39 PM by Jon Meltzer

Mary (76), I took the duplication for a joke.

Posted May 30, 2007 4:50 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa @61
I didn't want to be a wet blanket, and I think we're doing OK. It's just, in a minor way, reflective of something Terry Karney says about torture.

The problem isn't so much the effect on the other person as the effect on us, if we let the glee of the experience carry us away. If we forget that there is another person at the other end of it*.

I just don't want what I'll call, for lack of a better term, karmic backlash. Not till you have your deflector shields properly angled again, at the very least.

Ignore me if I'm being a prig, or a bore, or something like that.

-----
* I still think this is a useful task to do, because there are also people at the other end of this plagiarism, and they're going to be hurt by what he's done†.
† I sound almost like Victorian sex education for woemn, don't I? You can do it, but for heaven's sake, don't enjoy it.

Posted May 30, 2007 4:58 PM by abi

Again I leave, this time to visit the vampires in the Red Cross bus, and there have been no sockpuppets--Teresa, did you use your mother's school teacher voice?

Posted May 30, 2007 5:03 PM by fidelio

Fair Use! Fair Use! You can't prove it's *all* copied! Nobody wants to hear MITCH'S side of the story, because you're all mindless libruls! They'll greet us with FLOWERS! GOD DID SO CREATE EVERYTHING SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO!!!!11!!

..

oh, sorry. It seems that train of thought was just too warped to stay on the rails. Ta ta!

Posted May 30, 2007 5:41 PM by Sockpuppet

Sockpuppet,

You forgot to accuse everyone we've ever met of censorship, preferably citing the First Amendment. Shocked at the omission, I am, shocked. I'd almost think you were pretending to be a sockpuppet.

Naah. Too Byzantine.

Posted May 30, 2007 5:46 PM by abi

I'm going to step out of character here and be exceptionally charitable, and suggest a radical hypothesis.

a) Mark Mitchell is actually the most insightful writer on the interweb, with a reputation that will be recognized by posterity, and

b) If a list of all the people he "plagiarized" were compiled, we'd have a list of all the bloggers who now possess access to a time machine. Or will have had future access to a time machine.

Posted May 30, 2007 6:04 PM by PZ Myers

Teresa @ #89:

Yeah, I now see that. I seem to be denser than usual today. The goatse thing threw me off...I see from Wikipedia that the site is no longer active (didn't click on it because 1. at work and 2. ew).

Posted May 30, 2007 6:08 PM by Mary Dell

By the standard, isn't it that you people are just mindless libruls?

Posted May 30, 2007 6:16 PM by Anticorium

#94: But, that's a William Tenn story!

Posted May 30, 2007 6:25 PM by Jon Meltzer

It might be worth considering that maybe that wasn't Mark Mitchell's web page. Sure, it had his name on it, and he is a guy who got caught stealing other people's work as a student. But the blog could have been set up by someone with a grudge. This is the intarwebs, after all. It's something I could imagine Karl Rove might do.

Posted May 30, 2007 7:29 PM by Sean Sakamoto

I put a note in the comments of the Daily Utah Chronicle story pointing to this blog post.
http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticleComments&ustory_id=6f4653b4-4c84-48fb-86da-b0bd36cc968c

Posted May 30, 2007 7:50 PM by Plagiarism disliker

abi (#90): Flattered to be sure, and more amused, because I'm wrestling with another post on the, general, subject.

Posted May 30, 2007 8:13 PM by Terry Karney

Sean, if someone was setting him up, they know his address: via whois

Posted May 30, 2007 8:13 PM by Marilee

#97: cf. Harry Turtledove's story "Hindsight."

Posted May 30, 2007 8:21 PM by Mark

I'd almost think you were pretending to be a sockpuppet.

Now why on earth would anyone want to do that?

Posted May 30, 2007 8:50 PM by Mary Rosh

Ah, plagiarism, my old nemesis, we meet again…

• Two students plagiarized *each other* in a class of mine this semester. Word-for-word paragraph, plus additional damning evidence. Claimed it was "unintentional." 0s for both. I gave each the opportunity to rewrite, averaged against a zero.
(On a side note, the paperwork I had to fill out to submit to the University after catching my students was massive, but I suppose it's for the teachers' own protection…)

• One student in a class last year plagiarized a paper on Mother Courage, and another one on Angels in America, extensively copying from (the first time) the textbook we use and (the second time) from sparknotes.com.

• While working at Barnes & Noble, I was clearing out back issues of literary journals. One quarterly named "Rattle," the Summer 2004 issue, had an interesting poem on Joe McCarthy. 20 of its 26 lines might strike one as similar to a Roy Cohn speech in Angels in America… a *lot*… Magazine did nothing. Poet claimed it was inadvertent.

Posted May 30, 2007 10:16 PM by Greg

HAI SAM

IM IN UR HAUS,
IN UR BOX,
WIT UR MAUS,
WIT UR FOX,
ON UR TRAIN,
IN UR CAR,
IN UR RAIN,
IN UR DARK,
EATIN UR GREEN EGGZ AND HAMZ

Posted May 30, 2007 11:04 PM by Daniel Martin

Gah! Wrong thread!

Posted May 30, 2007 11:06 PM by Daniel Martin

Still puzzling over this scenario - any possibility he was a design student who got tired of "Lorem Ipsem?"

Posted May 30, 2007 11:29 PM by Sarah

#104

20 of its 26 lines might strike one as similar to a Roy Cohn speech in Angels in America…

Was it meant to be "found poetry"?

(What's the difference between found poetry and plagiarism? Found poetry has linebreaks.)

Posted May 30, 2007 11:34 PM by James D. Macdonald

@ 108

I'm dead from ROTFL, Jim; take my wallet and tricorder.

Posted May 31, 2007 12:12 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

I guess the plagiarists in the rest of the world are lazier than the ones at my (highly competitive) high school. They only stole from the very finest in truly obscure English poetry, or obscure translations of non-English poetry. I recall recognizing a French poem in translation at one point, and another that I only recognized because my great-grandfather was the obscure Canadian poet being stolen from.

Posted May 31, 2007 12:37 AM by Cynthia Wood

Looks like the MySpace page is down as well - I'm guessing he deleted his profile to avoid the embarrassing messages that were no doubt on the way.

(Unless I just had a bad URL, in which case I still have a chance to mock him myself).

Posted May 31, 2007 1:10 AM by Kurt Montandon

I wonder if someone was taking the piss out of Mark, possible annoyed/aggravated by his previous plagiarism? Kind of a malicious sock blog? That or maybe the usual sociopathology of the living a total lie.

Posted May 31, 2007 2:25 AM by Pinko Punko

Even worse: his gmail handle from that GoDaddy whois pulls up some 2003 movie reviews by Mark Mitchell. Box of rocks is starting to look pretty smart in comparison, or someone really has it out for the poor schlub.

Posted May 31, 2007 2:31 AM by Pinko Punko

Hi Teresa. I've just tagged you for the 8-fact meme.

Posted May 31, 2007 4:13 AM by Lee

Hi Teresa. I've just tagged you for the 8-fact meme.

Posted May 31, 2007 4:14 AM by Lee

Interestingly, Ms. Wilson apparently published an early draft of the "Cocksucker Blues" article on Salon.com, prior to including it in her book.

Exhibit A, published March 22, 2007: http://www.sff.net/people/yog/mitchell1e.jpg

"Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of teen sensations is now a multi-national Moloch, and such phenomenon as Menudo, New Kids on the Block, 'N Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and Disney's High School Musical represent a vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen -- i.e., the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria which causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinderwhores and throw high-pitched grand mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.

Twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York City and screamed for teen-masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys in the summer of 1999. A few days earlier, another twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. American seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird screaming hysteria to have died along with the Beatles."

Exhibit B, published May 25, 1999:
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/05/25/ricky/index.html

"Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of puppy-lovable teen sensations is now a multinational Moloch, and such phenomena as N-Sync, The Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys represent a whole vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e. the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand-mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.

About 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York and screamed for teen masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys last week, and a few days earlier, another 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird screaming hysteria to die along with the Beatles."

Posted May 31, 2007 4:37 AM by Meowse

Clarification: I'm assuming that Mr. Mitchell's post, the "Exhibit A" above, was taken verbatim from Ms. Wilson's book. I lack a copy of Ms. Wilson's book to quote from, and am thus reduced to quoting from her plagiarist to demonstrate the evolution of her essay.

Posted May 31, 2007 5:06 AM by Meowse

Pinko Punko #113: If the Pirates of the Caribbean script review at your link is by the same Mark Mitchell, I can see why he usually posts other people's words.

Posted May 31, 2007 5:08 AM by Niall McAuley

Terry @100
Should I haunt your blog, or will it appear here? I would really, really like to read what you have to say on the subject; your writings in the comments here have given me a lot of new perspectives and food for thought.

Posted May 31, 2007 6:54 AM by abi

I wonder how many lesser known bloggers he's stolen from. I hope a bunch of people sue his ass for every penny he has and every penny he ever will have.

(I write for a living, so I get a bit angrier than most over plagiarism.)

Posted May 31, 2007 9:19 AM by DBK

I was thinking to make a T-shirt "I was plagiarised by Mark Mitchell and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" but it would apparently be too common to be hip.

Posted May 31, 2007 9:43 AM by bryan

"It might be worth considering that maybe that wasn't Mark Mitchell's web page. Sure, it had his name on it, and he is a guy who got caught stealing other people's work as a student. But the blog could have been set up by someone with a grudge."

hmm, it would be great if someone made a really good plagiarism bot and set it loose just to make it seem like Mark Mitchell was the king of plagiarizers.

Posted May 31, 2007 9:46 AM by bryan

in fact, in honor of the idea above:

Posted May 31, 2007 9:47 AM by bryan

Any idea why he is plagarising? Is he looking to sell ads? Is this a spam-blog site?

The change in titles suggest it's handmade plagarism and not just datascraping.

Posted May 31, 2007 9:50 AM by Mark Mitchell

Hey, you're not Mark Mitchell!

Posted May 31, 2007 11:07 AM by Mark Mitchell

Here we go again.

Posted May 31, 2007 11:14 AM by Spartacus

abi (#119): Haunt my blog, please.

Right now it's a work in progress. I'm trying to look at how the reasoning faculities get switched off when people look at terror.

How, one wonders, can Dershowitz say torture is acceptable; why does someone who is skeptical of bad data in things like creationism, decide that a small sampling of people with motive to lie are more credible than all the other evidence.

Right now it's dreckish. The skeleton is there, but the flesh is flabby.

I can send you the draft for comment if you like.

Posted May 31, 2007 11:23 AM by Terry Karney

I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk ...

Posted May 31, 2007 11:29 AM by Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky

Terry,

I'd be glad to read it & give you any feedback that I can. I'm a lot less in touch with current politics than you, and a lot less refined a moral thinker, but I can give you the idiot's view.

Tell me if you don't know how to derive my email from this site.

Posted May 31, 2007 11:32 AM by abi

"Hey, you're not Mark Mitchell!"

Yes, I am, in fact I wrote this song to prove it:

"The Real Mark Mitchell"
by me-

May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Mark Mitchell please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Mark Mitchell please stand up?
We're gonna have a problem here..

You all act like you never seen a genius before
Jaws all on the floor like Pam, like Tommy just burst in the door
and started whoopin her ass worse than before
they first were divorce, throwin her over furniture (Ahh!)
It's the return of the... "Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding,
that's too obvious to be plagiarism?"
And Teresa Nielsen Hayden said... nothing you idiots!
If she'd said anything I'd be claiming credit for it here! (Ha-ha!)
Copy editor women love Mark Mitchell
cause Mark Mitchell copies everything they're editing anyway...

anyway it's a work in progress, it's pretty good if I say so myself, totally new, nothing like it has ever been heard in this world before. I'm the new Ruttles, me, the real Mark Mitchell.

Posted May 31, 2007 11:33 AM by Mark Mitchell

Well, I don't really know anything about this Mark Mitchell guy but I think what he was really doing was spreading the knowledge of a lot of good writing, and repackaging it for better distribution across what some of you may know as the internet.
Anyhow I guess he didn't expect to be mistreated for his good deeds, and I can totally understand why he may have brought his server offline.

I just hope you people are ashamed of yourselves for maligning this young man. Especially you who wrote the bad Eminem ripoff, you're no Mark Mitchell young man (or lady) and you never will be.

Posted May 31, 2007 11:38 AM by socky sockman

Has anyone mentioned this already? Could it be related?

Posted May 31, 2007 11:38 AM by Tim

Back up at #2, Kathryn mentioned a splog.

What's a splog?

Posted May 31, 2007 12:08 PM by kate

I think a "splog" is a spam blog.

It happens, sometimes, when an account goes dormant, and some one hacks it, filling it with links to boost page rank.

Or they just build it from scratch.

They often look like metastasized, spam, e-mails.

Posted May 31, 2007 12:15 PM by Terry Karney

I wonder what it says about us that, in a thread where sockpuppets don't exist, we invent them?

Posted May 31, 2007 12:35 PM by Mary Dell

This is the single most impressive example of the power of bringing public scrutiny on an evil-doer that I have seen. From discovery to citizen journalism to bringing down the plagiarist in under two hours. (You must use this power only for good.)

Posted May 31, 2007 12:41 PM by Deb Geisler

OMG. Tim, well spotted! We may have here on our hands a celebrity plagiarizer. The notoriety! I may swoon.

Posted May 31, 2007 12:43 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Mark Mitchell may be the culprit, or it could be a frame job to discredit him. Just saying.

Posted May 31, 2007 1:13 PM by Leva

Leva 138: Or maybe Mark Mitchell has faked his own frameup in order to discredit his persecutors and cast doubt on previous claims of plagiarism.

Crazy? Sure -- crazy like a fox.

Posted May 31, 2007 1:29 PM by Howard Peirce

If it was a frameup to discredit him, the perp would most likely leave the site up and start arguments in the comment threads.

Posted May 31, 2007 1:37 PM by Mary Dell

Tim @ 132:

I don't know... that article talks about a manuscript sent for comment in 1999 and (a revised and possibly with plagiarism aded) manuscript at a publisher in 2001. The MM fired from the U. of Utah paper was presumably a college student, and so would mostly likely have been 15 or younger in 1999... Also, the Florida MM received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, which seems a bit unlikely for the Utah MM.

I think the Florida person is a completely separate case.

Posted May 31, 2007 2:00 PM by Peter Erwin

I'm with Peter on this one. I've been nosing around on the web, and their chronologies don't mesh. Strange as it may seem, it looks like there are two serial plagiarists named Mark Mitchell.

For added weirdness, the Florida Mark Mitchell is the longtime partner, co-author, and co-editor of writer David Leavitt, who was himself busted for plagiarism by Stephen Spender.

Posted May 31, 2007 2:13 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Just for clarification: the Lee who posted #114 is not me. I don't tag people for memes. Perhaps I should add something to my ID for differentiation?

#128: *snork!* I wondered how long it would take for Lobachevsky to show up.

Posted May 31, 2007 2:16 PM by Lee

The Google cached page up there references his Email, should anyone want to drop him a note:

mark.mitchell@utah.edu

What is so hard about putting a notice at the top of a post, including the link and author's name (OR Blog), concerning the origins of it?

Answer: Admitting that you didn't write it.

Link factories that yank stories unedited with source links I can understand. Heck, at least they help your Blog a bit. But straight plagerism? Sad... Truly sad.

Posted May 31, 2007 2:19 PM by Connecticut Man1

Lee who doth not tag people for memes @ 143:
#128: *snork!* I wondered how long it would take for Lobachevsky to show up.

Ah, you missed his first appearance up @ 26...

And I was listening to "Lobachevsky" on my iPod only a couple of nights ago...

... which makes me think: does anyone know of a recording of Danny Kaye's "Stanislavsky", the inspiration for "Lobachevsky"?

Posted May 31, 2007 2:33 PM by Peter Erwin

Why didn't the fellow copy DVDs and retail them over the Internet as streaming media instead, giving a LEGITIMATE target to RIAA and MPAA to slice and dice and excoriate and make an example out of, instead of mugging random often innocent citizens with the their fascist unconstitutional attitudes about "only the BIG DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES should benefit from copyright and get income from it and control intellectual property!"

Posted May 31, 2007 3:21 PM by Paula Lieberman

From #133: Back up at #2, Kathryn mentioned a splog.

Yes, a splog is a spam blog: scrapes or duplicates info from other sites for the purpose of generating Google hits, usually for the purpose of generating revenue via Google Ads, though sometimes for political purposes (see also TNH's writings on Astroturfing).

There are many more out there than you think. There are circulating lists of splogs used by those who manage search engines that are used for the purpose of keeping splogs from overwhelming legitimate content.

The splog technique is also sometimes used for stalking: one person or a small group of people create a dozen or two splogs (usually duplicating content to save on labor) targeting their victim in order to give the impression that there are many people out there who have bad things to say about the victim, not just a couple.

Posted May 31, 2007 3:35 PM by Kathryn Cramer