this might not be a big issue to many people outside media business, but it just reveals how many grey areas we have and what are the current level of media ethics in china.
ESWN blog translated an article from Nanfang Daily, and his translation was later copied by China Daily web site and attributed to Sophia Beach at China Digital Times, another china-related blog who quoted ESWN's translation in a more professional way. Danwei questioned China Daily's conduct, and followed by some debates at Peking Duck.
an insider of the CD tells us why this happens:
Yes, there is a habit of plagiarism, but I think it is done out of ignorance rather than design. People here simply don't think of it as particularly bad, more like flattery. If enough people complain about it, they will probably stop doing it.
Thirdly, and as I've already pointed out on my blog, they also just make stuff up. This tends to be done on the lighter material rather than the news. Before you all jump in, I've seen this happen on UK papers too - it's just laziness.
another reader gives us the criteria for what is an "appropriate" citing practice:
1. Source clearly stated
2. Quoted material is clear (won't be confused with rest of article)
3. Material is QUOTED, rather than outright copied. (i.e., there is incentive to look at original source).
this lead me to other questions as what should be the norms for bloggers and how many of us are following the norms. as we all know (and explained by ESWN in a later note for the CD case), most bloggers won't hassle themselves to ask permission for re-production or citation of the source articles in advance, and many of them don't have the habit to indicate the full links to the original source articles. some of the bloggers, who depend mostly on commenting on others' articles, devote part of their site into commercial activities.
A related issue is intellectual property rights. As I just said, I yield the rights to my translation efforts, which are far from perfect anyway. But there is also the IPR of the original authors and publishers. I had not asked for their permission. If I did that for every piece of translation, I would be bogged down on paperwork here. My observation was that the authors and publishers would not have their works translated anyway. The choice was between a lost opportunity to showcase their work and my violation of their IPR. I chose the latter. Indeed, they may sue me and I am guilty as charged. I am only counting on the goodwill of my 'victims' to recognize that I am showcasing their work to the world at large and they might appreciate that my efforts are advantageous to them in some ways. They wrote in order to be heard and I am only gave them a global audience that they are not getting otherwise. If they ever want to do it themselves, I'll gladly step aside.
i agree that we expect China Daily should adopt a more professional standard for citation and other issues of IPRs, and their editors should spend some time to learn the business ethics first, however, since there are still grey areas like i mentioned above in the virtual world, i don't CD and some other web media as well deserve the accusations we brought against them.