Information Wants to be Free (of Attribution)
Dare to compare my December '03 weblog entry covering an essay by Reed Hundt about broadband in the U.S. with a Slashdot story today about the same essay. The person who submitted the article to Slashdot seems to have magically arrived at almost precisely the same blurb about the essay that I used a couple months earlier. Mostly, I'm just happy to have a little validation of my blurb-writing skills, but I would have liked some credit. The copyright on this site allows anyone to use any of my material, but requires attribution.
What makes this incident particularly precious (well, coincidental anyway) is that this afternoon, I led a discussion in a seminar using a set of powerpoint slides that someone mistakenly left out on a public web server. I found them through a Google search, and they were just the thing for the seminar, but I should have asked the author for permission to use them. So yeah, I'm a big hypocrite, what can you do?