Score digit for the bag team

While looking for a law review article about e-book licensing, I found an article on Gizmodo that had been lifted by techfeeds.info. The copying site used a primitive thesaurus algorithm to change many of the words, paying no attention to mere details like part-of-speech or context. An undergrad CS major could construct a better algorithm, but the results would not be anywhere near as funny.

My best guess is that techfeeds.info is a splog that’s trying a (new?) approach to avoid accusations of plagiarism or copyright infringement, like a deluded middle school student who thinks that research means copying an encyclopedia article sentence by sentence while changing a few words. Here’s the kicker: blog posts like this one from Gizmodo sometimes include attributed quotes. In fact, Gizmodo in this post quotes a multi-paragraph summary written by a group of named law students, and techfeeds.info mangles that entire quote as well. In doing so, techfeeds.info may give baffled readers the impression that these law students are incoherent writers, and the impression that Columbia Science and Technology Law Review publishes nonsense. (All while praising the “original, astonishingly readable jural summary.”) Law firms surely Google job applicants’ names, and this could create a rather bad impression. Is techfeeds.info engaged in defamation, slander, or both?