Mined

I was sifting through my Google alerts that come to my work e-mail the other day when I came across a link to story about prescription drug abuse and its increases in the past few years. I wrote a story about teen deaths a few months ago, so I've sort of been interested in the topic ever since.

As I was reading the story, I came to a quote that looked really familiar from a law enforcement officer in our county. My first thought, being that I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, is that the officer just repeated his words to this reporter. When I read on, I found about five or six more quotes that were in my story, along with paragraphs of information that he had pulled from my story and rearranged ever so slightly.

My editor wrote the Web site where it was published, and the guy replied that our charge was ridiculous, that we didn't understand the Internet or plagiarism. Hmmm, last time I checked, taking someone else's ideas and putting your name on it is plagiarism. That hasn't changed with the advent of the Internet. Well, glad I could make someone's day a little easier. The irony is, the company that publishes the Web site is called "Truth Publishing."

Lesson learned: Truth has changed.