Remember Where You Read it First

(4/22/2002)

If plagiarization is journalism's sincerest form of flattery, then we should probably feel most honored.

The April 15 edition of ETurbo News, sent from Hawaii to a claimed readership of 110,000 travel professionals worldwide, copied an article word-for-word that appeared the day before on balidiscovery.com and last week's edition of Bali Update.

The Article "Minister Ardika Hints at Visa Changes" was an original, copyrighted story by balidiscovery.com and Bali Update including our original translations of attributed material from the Indonesian press. And, if our Hawaiian colleagues would care to check the international treaties on copyright, protection is specifically extended to translated materials as well as original writing - our story contained both.

In fact, balidiscovery.com is fairly liberal in granting permission to other media to use our material. All we require is the courtesy of a simple request beforehand and an attribution to balidiscovery.com.

Both the request for permission and any attribution to balidiscovery for originating the story ETurbo News printed word-for-word were lacking.

So the next time you're reading ETurbo News you might well wonder where you read the story first.

Now here's an article you'll probably not read on ETurbo News.