Hey, guys! I wanted to take some time to touch on copyright/plagiarism issues. Regrettably, it's something we run into often on NewsBoiler, simply because so many different sites at different stages are passing through.
To draw on recent events, some of you are aware that Game Informer is pursuing those sites that have posted their content. This renders links to those posts on N4G null, and those that we are aware of are have been pulled. In the future, submissions with content culled from Game Informer (bulleted, scanned, summarized or otherwise in violation of copyright) will be failed on sight.
If you have questions or concerns about other publications being submitted to N4G or other NewsBoiler sites, we have clearly outlined means for pursuing copyright complaints in our TOU. http://n4g.com/site/termsof... When these complaints are received we pursue them aggressively (as sites that have been blocked from NewsBoiler may grumpily attest).
N4G isn't an arbiter in discussions between content owners and content thieves, but we remove plagiarized content aggressively, and curate sources available for use on NewsBoiler accordingly. If "content curation" sounds a little fuzzy to you, that covers sites that scrape content as well as a startup blog type that is copy/pasting work heavily to boost their content. Weeding those out is beneficial for the N4G readership. N4G is news for gamers first, that we have a passionate and focused community can definitely benefit gaming sites, but that's not our objective.
That covers most of what we act on, and in the hopes of improving the content quality in our corner of the net I'm going to drop some knowledge:
Have you heard of the Copyright Act?
If you violate copyright law, you can be prosecuted. It doesn't need a copyright symbol, if you reproduce someone's IP without permission, it's covered. The next time you pull a photograph or a video you did not create, think of this.
Fair Use
You may have heard of fair use, and its exemptions, but most of the time things do not fall under fair use. Fair use requires work. If it's copied, it's not fair use. If the bulk of your work is not original (in ideas or text), it's not fair use. Furthermore, "If you are creating a work that competes with the original in its own market, and may do the original author economic harm," it's not fair use. ( http://plagiarism.org/ask-t...
Plagiarism.org has good info on the common types of plagiarism we encounter almost daily here on NewsBoiler:
http://www.plagiarism.org/p...
Too often we see #2 - the "CTRL C" which "Contains significant portions of text from a single source without alterations". This is easily one of the most frequent complaints we get from content owners where the plagiarizing writer does not understand that what they have done is wrong.
#1, a Clone (the whole thing copy pasted) occurs more often than you'd think with text, and more often than you'd think was possible with other media.
In conclusion, eat your vegetables.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
*eats some more carrots*
And DRINK YO PRUNE JUICE.
Just please, PLEASE make sure that they don't abuse it to bully smaller sites from mirroring news that wasn't even broken by GI themselves. You see that so often online these days, like on Youtube where people take credit for stuff that doesn't even remotely belong to them, simply because they also posted it and want the hits.
Since we've already had a top X list for every conceivable line of thought and topic can we now start flagging them for plagiarism? :)
*This comment is composed of entirely original content*
I like to think you're always happiest when you're swinging that damned hammer of yours. So please Cat, make us both happy. Go nuts!
Swing that thing around like you're a fat kid defending yourself from a trip to Fat Camp. It's time the site had a spring clean anyway.
P.S. Sparing me would also be good. ;)
Edit: Am I suppose to bow, curtsy or grovel? What's the protocol here?
I don't think fair use is what you claim it as is. I had posted a summary of an article (Read: not the actual article) from July 2013's Game Informer. It was denied.
a summary that used not a single word from the article. just my thoughts from it.