Jason Unger

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A representative for 4SquareMedia, the Australian company owned by mass plagiarist David Richards, has admitted to Richards' theft of content, despite his "ghost hacker" excuses.

In an email sent to me, Nicole Bence, a "director" at 4SquareMedia, has the audacity to ask if they can use content from CE Pro — after I asked them AGAIN to remove a story they stole from us (emphasis is mine).

Hi Jason,

My name is Nicole Bence and I am a Director at 4Square Media. I understand David has put up some of your stories in the past without permission. Obviously with web content stories are shared on a daily basis and I was hoping to get some feedback from you in regards to our sites. We have removed this story, but we would like to be able to push our readers to your content when necessary. Is this a possibility and if so what are your guidelines for ensuring CE Pro are given the correct reference.

Thanks Jason – appreciate your help.

Regards,

Nicole

The number of comments and emails I've received from people who have worked for David Richards is constantly growing, and they all have one theme: how horrible it was.

At this point, it's pretty obvious he is not going to change (even if he is exposed all over Australian TV).

For anything to happen, his advertisers need to stop supporting him. But from rumblings I've heard, he doesn't make it easy for them to do that.

Honestly, I'm sick and tired of dealing with this guy.

(BTW - this admission started after SmartHouse copied an article from CE Pro with no permission to do so, despite giving "CE Pro" the byline. I emailed them, and Bence's response followed.)

Searching for a new format war?

Look no further than HDMI vs. Component Video. Yeah, it's not a new battle, but it sure is one that's being fought pretty tooth and nail by custom installers.

In the HDMI vs. component debate, plenty of people have strong opinions on the subject. CE Pro recently solicited these opinions via an e-mail blast.

The vast majority of respondents far prefer to use component video for a number of reasons. Most of the complaints about HDMI center around distance issues, the challenge of terminating in the field, the fact that the connections easily disconnect, the fragility of the cables, the large connector size and HDMI’s far greater expense.

There were also a number of complaints about compatibility issues, the lack of HDMI standards, HDCP issues and a negligible quality improvement.

In the Unger household, we use both: component from our cable box, and HDMI from our upconverting DVD player. It's a pretty simple solution and we haven't yet run into any problems.

But for guys who are making their living setting up home entertainment systems, non-functioning equipment is a huge problem. And as much as you may argue otherwise, a lot of it has to do with HDCP (the content protection scheme used in HDMI to "prevent piracy."

When I caught up with Steve Venuti of HDMI Licensing at EHX, he pretty much admitted that a lot of the early problems could have been avoided if HDCP didn't exist.

HDMI would have entered the market easier without HDCP, but the studios wouldn't have let it happen. "It's a situation not everyone is happy with," he says. "But the reality is, they own the content."

So if I buy a Blu-ray disc, they still own the content? That's the problem with content "protection" in general: it assumes that consumers are thieves. What business gets away with treating its customers like that?

Component video does not have HDCP. And that's one of the big reasons installers like it — there's no handshakes to go along with it.

But this war is not new: it's not like component video has come out as an alternative to HDMI — it's been around for much longer. So think of it more as SACD vs. CD — which one do you buy?

Exactly.

PS - thanks to Gordon for making the comparison to HD DVD to me, which inspired this post.

Believe it or not, I'm a manager now. At the ripe old age of 24, I have an assistant Web editor for CE Pro — meaning that things are changing for me and for the site.

So far, things are going well. Steve — the assistant editor — is catching on quick and picking up a lot of the stuff that was slipping through the cracks previously. The site has grown a lot in the past year and we've needed more hands, so he's a welcome addition.

Because of this, my role has changed as well — in addition to doing the things that I need to do, I need to make sure Steve has things to do. There's no shortage of work to be done, but I'm not just looking out for myself anymore; I'm looking out for him, too.

Add into the fact that I'm managing virtually — literally. He's in Boston, I'm in DC. So while I was there for his first few days, the rest of our relationship has been over IM. It's not bad; it's just different. When you're doing things over IM, words matter much more. There are no body signs or emotions you can pick up on — it's only what the words say and mean.

So as he picks up some of the things keeping me from new ventures on the site, I'm working on developing an expanded community and growing our lead-gen content.

Change is good; I'm honestly not sure where I would be if change wasn't always happening. Doing the same thing over and over again is mundane. When people my age are changing jobs every 18 months, I've been with the same company for 3 years (but am now in my third position).

I'm excited for the future.

Slashdot picked up a story CE Pro ran last year (like, June 2006) on The Batcave Home Theater, a custom theater room up in Maine.

It's not new, but the link from Slashdot (a huge source of traffic) went to a site called Slashfilm (not related, as far as I know). So, Slashfilm was getting tons of traffic from content that they didn't create.

Normally, I'm okay with that — obviously, I'd like to get the traffic, but you have to live with the fact that sometimes you don't get what you want.

The problem, however, is that
1) Slashfilm didn't bother to link to the original article on CE Pro (a quick mention of the "June 2006 issue of CE Pro" was all we got)
2) They took the entire slideshow, cropped out our watermark, and posted it

The non-linkage isn't right, but can be easily remedied. On the other hand, taking the images and cropping out the watermarks is stealing content.

This is the second time in two weeks I've had to deal with people stealing content without proper attribution.

I emailed Slashfilm's editor, Peter Sciretta, asking him to add a link to our story and replace the images with the original, watermarked versions.

I haven't heard back from him (and it looks like his site is down now), but in reality, it doesn't matter if he replaces them or not. The images have already been cropped, our watermark is gone, and anyone who sees them can distribute them without attribution.

So, what are you supposed to do in this situation?

I emailed CmdrTaco (aka Rob Malda), who originally posted the story at Slashdot, and told him the story. It's not like I'm worried about bloggers promoting and sharing content we create — it's doing it without proper attribution and basically stealing credit for other's work.

CmdrTaco went ahead and changed the link in the Slashdot story to the original article on CE Pro, and now we're getting the influx of traffic.

What's the moral of the story?

Don't steal and properly attribute or it will come to bite you in the ass.

You may have never heard of David Richards, but if you're writing anything in the technology sector, he's probably familiar with your work.

Richards, seen here on the right (via)

You see, Richards is the biggest plagiarist in technology journalism today, consistently stealing content from Web sites and re-publishing under his own byline.

Richards is in management at SmartHouseNews, an Australian Web site owned by publishing house 4SquareMedia. Oddly, 4SquareMedia has no Web site, as its official domain is a parked hosting page, and its .net equivalent reveals that "this is a test."

Phil Sim at Squash has an excellent background on Richards, who wrote a questionable story on 60% of Windows Vista needing to be re-written.

Without a doubt, Richards is the most notorious and controversial technology journalist in Australia and it won't surprise anyone down under in the tech media or IT industries that he's managed to get himself embroiled in this kind of saga.

First things, first. Richards is a real, bona fide journalist. He's not an amateur blogger. He's not a techie, who took up a writing. He's got a Fleet Street background and was responsible for one of the most, important investigative journalism works ever published in Australia when his expose on the Painters and Dockers union uncovered extensive corruption and sparked a historical Royal Commission.

Richards is also a successful entrepreneur. He started a PR company, Weston Communications, which he built up and sold and following that he founded a publishing company DWR Media, which he flogged to US publisher Penton Media for up to $US8 million (Penton would about 2 years later offload the division for a pittance).

Along the way, though, he's ticked a lot of people off. He's brash, pushy and thrives on controversy. He always seems to be suing someone, or else being sued. In the past few months, he's been accused on plagiarism, attacked for conflicts of interest and laid a big, steelcapped boot into one of the world's biggest PR companies.

I was first tipped off to Richards' plagiarism by Lee Distad, a contributor to CE Pro, who saw that a story he wrote ("How the Format War Affects Custom Shops") appeared on SmartHouseNews.com.au.

The article, given a new title of "Are You Making Money Out of the Format War?", has Richards as the lead writer in the byline, with Lee given second billing. The two stories are nearly identical.

We gave him no permission to publish the story, and given that Lee wrote the story, Richards' byline is completely unwarranted.

It's straight-up plagiarism.

Richards has plagiarized other stories from CE Pro, including at least one that I wrote. At least two of the stories (originals here and here) have his sole byline (copies here and here).

When I contacted Richards to remove Lee's story from his site, he ignored my email, even though I said I wanted to keep it civil. One week later, I re-sent the email, CC'ing the contacts of SmartHouseNews's Web site, including sales, marketing and editorial.

Richards replied, saying, "This was removed a week ago."

But it wasn't. And, as of this writing, it's still there.

It isn't just CE Pro that Richards plagiarizes.

He's plagiarized TWICE (his version here), Big Picture Big Sound, BusinessWeek (original and copy) and The Hollywood Reporter (original and copy).

He's republished stories from Residential Systems (original and copy) and Stereophile (original and copy).

He's even republished feature stories from CE Pro as from a "US Wire Service" (original and copy).

I could keep on going on about stories he's copied, his continued acts of plagiarism and his general disregard for other's work, but I would be here all night.

Richards is a disgrace to journalism and should be shunned by the technology industry — journalists, manufacturers and marketing folks alike. I agree with Robert Scoble, who called for Richards to be fired after his Vista-rewrite story. Can him.

On SmartHouseNews's site right now, there are advertisements from Pioneer and Mitsubishi. You are decent companies, but you shouldn't support publications based in plagiarism. Please consider dropping your advertising.