Aggregation or plagiarism?
That’s pretty shocking. If their facts are correct, it is without question plagiarism.
If she in fact is re-publishing the works of others, without attribution, as her own, it also appears to be copyright infringement.
Bruce
Even WITH attribution, it’s copyright infringement, if done without permission, as appears to be the case.
What is crazy is people paying for her wine reviews to begin with.
Now the comments section adds allegations of “pay to play”. Wineries that wanted to have their wine reviewed would have to subscribe. It gets deeper.
Monte
…which was written by Karen MacNeil.
Tom yes made correction above. How could I confuse.
Again why would a subsriber pay for any of her reviews. Does she even review good wine or is it mostly grocery wines?
Agast, I just cancelled my membership!! 
Seriously who the heck is this women with a career in irrevelance? It’s sad we have to give someone like this publicity…I know just how to take her down…I’ll give her permission to use all my tasting notes, that should dry up the membership for good!
She doan need your stinkin permissions! ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
She should have just published the reviews posted here or CT or some other forum. I bet very few people would have known and fewer still would have minded. I wonder how many subscribers she has.
This is pretty bad/sad.
I ended up on her email list a number of years ago - not sure how. It wasn’t a paid subscription but a weekly or so newsletter - “Nat Decants”? or something like that. Asked to be removed after a few months as the wines she was covering weren’t of particular interest, and her writing style was excessively perky for my taste.
I had a run-in with her at the start of the century, back at the old Squires board. She kept on posting nonsense about wine and food combinations and when I questioned her about it, she got extremely unfriendly. It turned ugly pretty quickly and I do believe Squires warned her about it -and in those days he was a lot more lenient, believe me- because she disappeared without a trace.
I guess she was more about marketing than actual knowledge and expertise and in that sense she was a pretty good harbinger of the then evolving blogosphere.
I remember when NatDecants somehow spammed the old Wine Therapy board, several people anyway. Talk about barking up the wrong tree. Funny that I say Roberto’s original post and immediately thought this is who it might be about.
This old comment from Joe Dressner about Ms Maclean says a lot: http://www.datamantic.com/joedressner/pageback/2263/
Scroll about half way down the page until you see a blond headshot.
God I miss Joe!
Nick–I won’t go too far off with a copyright tangent, but…
Under the fair use doctrine, one is permitted to quote passages from the copyrighted works of others under appropriate circumstances. You don’t need the original author’s permission to
be protected by the fair use doctrine:
Fair use, however, would NOT apply if someone was republishing another’s copyrighted work as one’s own and without proper attribution.
Bruce
In this case, however, it seems pretty clear that she failed the fair use test. The material was posted on a commercial site, she used the entirety of the reviews, and her purpose doesn’t meet any of those acceptable to claim fair use (parody, commentary, criticism, research, reporting, teaching). From the article, it seems like her primary motivation was to drive traffic to her site and increase subscriptions by providing full reviews written by other people. That seems to pretty clearly violate fair use, regardless of whether the original authors were attributed. I guess that the big question is whether her doing so harmed the value of the original reviews.
It’s my understanding that if she was writing additional commentary or criticism of someone else’s review, she might be able to claim fair use, though I’m not sure how the commercial nature of her site affects that. There’s no fine line regarding what qualifies as “commentary” or “criticism,” but she couldn’t just include the review and add “I agree” or “Yep, sounds right.” And I think she’d be treading on murky legal ground by including the entire reviews, as opposed to a summary or snippet.
I think I’ve said it all right here.
That’s a common practice in the business world, maybe not publishing.
I’ve done it both from the marketing side and the reference side. When launching new software or updates it’ll include a customer testimonial which was attributed to the client, which they agree to, but didn’t write themselves.