Who's the cheater?

My friend and recent blogger tournament partner Jennifer Newell writes a column for Poker Player newspaper. (See archives here.) Take a look at the one she wrote recently on the challenges Joe Sebok faces in living up to his commitment to get UltimateBet to fully come clean on its cheating scandal, here.

Now take a look at the blog post put up earlier today by Richard Marcus on his "Poker Cheating and Casino Cheating" blog, here. You might spot more than a few similarities, and you will find no attribution.

By my quick review, it appears that after the first paragraph and the first few words of the second paragraph, the entire blog post is lifted word-for-word from Jen's column. It's possible there are a few word changes that I didn't notice, but if so, they are minor.

There's just no escaping it: Richard Marcus plagiarized about as flagrantly as it's possible to do. The irony is that this is in a blog devoted to exposing cheating. Marcus famously claims to be a reformed casino cheater. It appears, though, that his ethics haven't improved any--he has simply changed the target. Instead of cheating casinos, he cheats (and steals from) other writers.

What a low-life scumbag. I wonder how many other of his posts are ripped off from other sites/writers, and I just haven't known of it before. I had always blithely assumed that his posts were original work, but now I have to wonder. Of course, when caught, cheaters/thieves always claim that it's their first time, but that's rarely true.

His email address, as listed on his blog, is richard@richardmarcusbooks.com. Why not drop him a line and tell him what you think of his plagiarism? I'm going to.


Addendum

TheLuckbox (who, coincidentally, sat on my immediate right through most of the blogger poker tournament last month) was inspired to do some poking around at other posts on Mr. Marcus's blog, and posted this series of three messages on Twitter:

@WriterJen @pokergrump Check out this:http://bit.ly/8Gyrh9 and this: http://bit.ly/5LLbzs More plagiarism?

Yep, it's all
plagiarism. Seems like every post. Here's another. This:http://bit.ly/5ZTdOO and this: http://bit.ly/7htPJF

And more plagiarism. This:http://bit.ly/8ciRDW and this:http://bit.ly/8N3XDq I think that's enough evidence.

Good work, sir! I probably should have taken the initiative to do a text search on some phrases from other posts in the blog, rather than just speculating that one would find more plagiarism by doing so.

Also, Matthew Parvis posted a Tweet a short time ago indicating that he had just yesterday emailed Mr. Marcus about stolen content from PokerNews.com, though he didn't point to any specific examples. He followed this up with another Tweet saying: "lame response that "he forgot to attribute" and that he added pokernews.com. I emailed him that it was not acceptable."

It certainly appears that stealing is the primary means of getting content onto Mr. Marcus's blog, and that he "forgets" to attribute as a matter of course. There's nothing wrong with a blog that gathers pointers to and/or reprints of posts and news articles on a given subject from sources all over the world. In fact, such things are extremely useful to those interested in the subject. But--do I really need to say this?--you have to provide documentation and give credit to your sources. If you do, you're providing a useful aggregation service to readers, who then don't have to scour blogs and news sources to find news and updates on some subject. If you don't, well, then you're just a scummy thief of content and intellectual property rights.