June 24th, 2009

Why does anyone care what Chris Anderson steals?

Posted in  Intellectual Property 
Author: Tom Giovanetti || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA

There's a bit of a furor today erupting over the discovery that Chris Anderson, the author of the book The Long Tail and the editor of Wired magazine, has been discovered plagiarizing Wikipedia entries in his new book Free.

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.

I'm having a little trouble here. First of all, who cares what Chris Anderson thinks about trends? After all, hasn't it already been revealed that Chris Anderson was essentially WRONG in The Long Tail?

In fact, Anderson himself has admitted that his entire theory in The Long Tail is wrong:

The WiReD editor admits that his theory is . . . flawed. It has become increasingly clear that the money is still in the Head, though Anderson’s fighting to keep as much legitimacy for his theory as possible:

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail. As Schmidt notes, it’s also hard to make money if you don’t have a Tail (to satisfy minority taste, which improves the consumer experience), but the revenues are disproportionately in the Head.”

I guess he’ll soon find out, now that his book has been relegated to the Tail.

Second, so now Anderson is going to build on his wrongness in The Long Tail by turning to authoritative sources like . . . let me get this right . . . WIKIPEDIA? Anderson realizes that his own brain isn't enough to sustain a theory so he turns to losers sitting at home on the sofa picking lint out of their navels and writing entries in Wikipedia, a source that pretty much acknowledges it self that it should not be considered authoritative?

In summary, a guy who has been proven willing to write books in areas where he doesn't know what he is talking about and is subsequently proven wrong is now stealing content from a source that admits it lacks authority and is subject to frequent errors and distortions?

Tell me again that Andrew Keen is wrong. Go ahead, I dare you.