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Authorship Versus Ownership
Plagiarism is journalism's sin of sins, but not its crime of crimes. In court it's a copyright violation, if that. Wendell Hutson is steaming mad because somebody else signed his work. Hutson's gunning for legal satisfaction, but don't count on him getting any. He used to write for the Illinois Real Estate Journal, a biweekly newspaper owned by the Law Bulletin Publishing Company in Chicago. Almost two years ago he reported on a $21 million development in Alton, Illinois. His saga began: "Twenty years after an Alton manufacturing plant closed its doors, the downtown site is now being developed into a potential 1 million square foot mixed-use business park with the potential for 1 million square feet." Now there's a lead in desperate need of a copy editor. Last November Hutson was fired from IREJ -- "I was a vocal complainer," he allows -- and he began freelancing for a living. He tells me a recent assignment led him back to a source for the Alton story, and this source said it was a funny thing but a story in the latest issue of the IREJ looked an awful lot like the one Hutson had written in August 2000. Hutson got himself a copy of the issue, and to his eye the two stories were virtually identical. In the May 20, 2002, Illinois Real Estate Journal he found a roundup of Illinois business park developments. The segment labeled "Alton" began: "Twenty years after an Alton manufacturing plant closed its doors, the downtown site is now being developed into a potential 1 million square foot mixed-use business park with the potential for 1 million square feet." The second time around, and that lead still hadn't been fixed! But to be fair, the occasional "will be" later in the story became a "was," and Hutson's original was trimmed by more than half. The entire roundup appeared under the byline of managing editor Brian Sutton. "That's plagiarism," said Hutson. "If you take something I wrote and put your name on it, that's plagiarism." He called publisher Michael Kramer and protested. Kramer said IREJ would run a note in a forthcoming issue, something Hutson described to me as a "correction" and Kramer as a "clarification." Finding Kramer insufficiently remorseful, Hutson warned him he intended to find a lawyer. "He said any legal action would be a waste of my time," Hutson told me. Kramer might be right. Hutson wrote the original piece as a salaried employee, which means the copyright presumably belongs to the company. "How can you plagiarize something you own the rights to?" Kramer wants to know. "Don't all newspapers use archival information?" He concedes that there should have been a note telling readers the survey was compiled from old IREJ stories, but if there wasn't, so what? "At the last minute in the production process, things slip through the cracks. I don't think we did anything wrong." As for Sutton, his conscience is clear. "I personally edited and wrote some of the information in the article," he says. "I know I added that lead." Given the lead it's hard to imagine anybody fighting over it, but Hutson insisted he was the author. "I can get that article now and I can go through for a fact what he put in there. It might have been five or six words. He mentioned that Alton is like 20 miles from Saint Louis, but that's the only contribution he made. "The article belongs to the Law Bulletin. They have the right to reprint the article. But they can't reprint it and put someone else's name on it." But what's the crime? He wasn't sure. "Fraud?" Is the public defrauded when it reads a Wendell Hutson story under the impression it's a Brian Sutton story? Hutson saw a lawyer who came up with a new theory. "Emotional distress," said Hutson. "Beyond that, he's looking into it to see if there are some other legal areas. But definitely the emotional distress of opening up a paper to see your story with someone else's name on it." I asked him to describe the distress. "I was shocked. I was amazed. You take pride in your work and to see someone else pass it off as their own work is damaging. I felt betrayed. This was someone I used to work with." If Hutson sues, we'll see how far his anguish gets him. Some behavior is tacky, amateurish, even inexcusable -- and unsuited for litigation. IREJ's appropriation of Hutson's Alton story could turn out to be an example. He was smart to call a moralizing media critic as well as an attorney. News Bites • A journalist here in our city might hold the president's dignity in his hands. Sun-Times columnist Zay Smith noted the other day that George W. Bush recently said this in Des Moines: "I remember -- I remember campaigning in Chicago, and one of the reporters said, would you ever deficit spend? I said only -- only in times of war, in times of economic insecurity as a result of a recession or in times of national emergency. Never did I dream we'd have a trifecta." Smith, with his own ax to grind, commented, "Why does he keep forgetting to mention the $1.3 trillion tax cut?"
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