Comments on: I Guess What [some] Consultants do is Steal

By: Syndicating Myself - CogDogBlog

Syndicating Myself - CogDogBlog — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:27:17 +0000

[...] allows a lot of flexibility in automaticall adding attribution links to content brought in (yo, Gilfus, this would have solved your own aggregation faux pas in 5 [...]

By: Hell hath no fury like Intellectual Property unattributed « The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Learning

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 15:49:48 +0000

[...] A L&D consultancy network (who shall remain @Gilfuseducation) has an extensive “industry news” section. There’s just one problem with it: much of the content has been scraped from other sources. Here’s one example from Alan Levine’s cogdogblog. [...]

By: A little friction can be a good thing | Abject

A little friction can be a good thing | Abject — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:27:24 +0000

[...] was nowhere near as upset, though I do not diminish how others felt… and the comments to both Alan’s post and Clark’s post unearthed some other details and allegations that are more [...]

By: Yo Gilfus, I Got Yer Syndication Fix - CogDogBlog

Yo Gilfus, I Got Yer Syndication Fix - CogDogBlog — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:15:49 +0000

[...] been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their o…. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most [...]

By: Cathy Finn-Derecki

Cathy Finn-Derecki — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 14:22:00 +0000

You’d think that someone motivated by profit would have more scruples.

By: Martha

Martha — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:19:50 +0000

I asked my students (emerging creators at Emily Carr University) what is the most important value for them? Their answer: that people who like their work communicate with them. In other words, attribution. Many artists are sceptical of adopting Creative Commons licenses because they do not actually want it to be easy for you to avoid the direct contact with them they want. This series of posts proves the point. Thanks made my day.

By: Dave Ferguson

Dave Ferguson — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:18:30 +0000

I never heard of Gilfus before, though they’re apparently based within 25 miles of me.

I have seen this kind of content-hoovering before, though. The disclaimers by such folk are generally unthinking, misinformed, or (at best) disingenuous.

Gilfus’s “terms of use” runs to almost 3,000 words, which is about the length of the U.S. Constitution minus the amendments.

I suspect if someone scraped, I mean, repurposed a slab of the invaluable content there without attribution, they’d move a lot faster and with a great deal more specificity.

By: David Jones

David Jones — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:10:02 +0000

Another example of an earlier offence is this from 2010. Like Mark, I wonder if Gilfus would like to comment?

By: Mark Smithers (@marksmithers)

Mark Smithers (@marksmithers) — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:50:09 +0000

Hi Alan,

About 3 years ago I gathered together a heap of publicly available LMS evaluations from around the world and put the results into a blog post as a useful resource for others to use under a CC BY license.
Gilfus took the post and reproduced it verbatim with no attribution. I wrote to them thanking them for their interest in the content and asking them to add an attribution. They said they would but they never did. Presumably they wanted it to appear as if it was their own ‘research’.
Maybe Brian D would care to respond given that the insinuation is that the problem has only existed for a few weeks.
It’s actually clear that Gilfus are a serial offender and they need to be called out.
Cheers

Mark

By: Doug Belshaw

Doug Belshaw — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:20:57 +0000

A byline would sort this, surely?