EVERY ONE OF THESE WEBSITES had reporters dig out the story on their own! Right?
The United Nations might as well have a Jolly Roger flag on its roof.
That's how prevalent plagiarism and piracy is today.
Plenty of websites and monetized blogs simply swipe and re-write everything from Associated Press, or one or two struggling veteran sites. (Some of these now beg you: "Please don't use ad-blocker, we need revenue" and "Please subscribe!")
You might remember Claude Rains in "Casablanca," being "shocked...SHOCKED..." at illegal activity...while collecting his winnings.
Fact is, most of the sites chirping and chattering about the Conan O'Brien case are all profiting from somebody else's work. All they did was re-write.
And that's pretty obviously what Conan's writers did. Wrong? Maybe, but understandable.
If your job is to find funny things to say about the day's news, you're going to check Newser, Gawker, Decider, Huffity-Puffity and the various crazies (NY Post, London Daily Mail). Then, maybe, you'll also glance at comedy websites, comedian Tweets, and even wisecracks from wise guys on Facebook.
Is that such a surprise? Lennon-McCartney would sit around saying "Let's write a Chuck Berry tune." Maybe they'd listen to a Buddy Holly number, steal a few chord changes, and come up with something original. Bob Dylan has famously defended plagiarism as part of the "folk tradition." That applies not just to his swiping of lines from a book and inserting them into a song lyric, but taking somebody's photographs and adapting them into paintings. Hell, even Bob's nemesis Joni Mitchell did that. She took a photo from National Geographic, of natives carrying a giant snake, and altered it for "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."
I once asked Jackie Mason if it bothered him that Don Adams stole, verbatim, some jokes and even recorded them. Jackie said he was surprised, but it wasn't such a big deal: "It didn't hurt me. They're buying our personalities."
True enough. The problem here, though, is that a guy who used to write jokes for Leno, and is now tossing them on a blog or on Twitter and hoping to get quoted or get work, gets a few of his jokes stolen (allegedly) instead. He should've been able to do what he (and others) did with Leno, Dangerfield and Rivers: email or fax the jokes and get paid as a freelancer for them.
As Sam Kinison said about wife beating, "I don't condone it...I UNDERSTAND IT!"
So, I'm not condoning Conan's staff for, perhaps (it's just an allegation now) re-writing somebody else's jokes now and then. But in these days, when YouTube is loaded with copied material, PayPal and its sister eBay traffic in dupe photos and every type of unlicensed and stolen property, and when news websites would rather steal and switch than pay staffers or Associated Press...IT HAPPENS.
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