I don't know what the deal is lately online, but it sure seems like a lot of people are doing what they want to call reposting information, but in my mind I don't care how you sugar coat it, they are essentially plagiarizing information that was written by someone else. It is one thing to write a blog post that discusses the content that someone else wrote and link back/provide reference to the original work. It is another thing entirely to repost the work on your site without providing the reference. Brent Ozar (blog/twitter) blogged about this problem at the end of June:
How to Take Action When Your Content is Plagiarized
More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism
which sparked some debate as to whether what InformationFlash was doing actually constituted plagiarism or not. Jason Massie (blog/twitter) didn't feel that anything was being done wrong by reposting content in whole for members of the SQL Server community. Most people tended to disagree with this sentiment but everyone has a right to their opinion.
Today I got an alert regarding a new web page with the word Extended Events on it, and happened on a blog that had a very comprehensive list of tools available for SQL Server. I thought this was pretty cool, so I shared it on Twitter. It didn't take 5 minutes for someone, in this case Kendal Van Dyke (blog/twitter) to point out that it was a complete copy of an article from SQL Server Magazine. You can compare the two yourself and decide:
Original SQL Magazine Article
While writing this post, the blog post mysteriously disappeared after a comment was left stating that it was plagiarized, but don't worry, I have a screenshot for you to compare to:
However, if it were only that simple I probably wouldn't be writing this post. That wasn't the only article plagiarized. Another one on the topic of Management was stolen from TechRepublic:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=1068
This too has been reported to TechRepublic and will probably be taken down shortly. What is it about people today that they don't think that this kind of thing is wrong/bad to do?