I have given up TVs and Newspapers as my source of news. For a simple reason non other than the nonsense & soul-killing nature of how, meaningless events are turned into some dollar making piece of junk. But I love movies.
Movies, on the other hand, are the opposite of headline news.
Regardless of how untrue a movie is, or how dramatic it is turned out, it is still a movie, a collective work of wisdom of some of the brightest mind & talent that is entertaining, sometimes rewarding and inspiring, but the beauty lies in the bucket of choice it entails, whether to watch it, or to ditch it, believe it or ignore it. Not surprisingly, it is often more true than any news channel or print media can present. The sentiment is, if it’s on the news it is true (I choose not to believe so) it will still be regarded as fact regardless of the truth, this ain’t pretty choice at all.
The world is not perfect.
The Internet, as history suggests is still in the dawn of its age, it is young, raw & barbaric, it is the world’s biggest catalog of truths & lies, it is also home to the world’s largest cage of copycats.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an example:
This is an excerpt of an article from a blog of one of Indonesia’s largest and oldest print magazine TEMPO, the article is in Indonesian and here’s an excerpt:
‘Berguru E-Commerce kepada Taobao’ (Learning E-commerce from Taobao):
Taobao.com adalah fenomena. Ada jutaan orang yang membuka toko daring di sana, dari mahasiswa, pensiunan, sampai ibu-ibu yang bosan menonton opera sabun. Ledakan pengguna Taobao.com bahkan mengalahkan eBay.com — situs lelang dari Amerika yang sempat ekspansi ke Cina.
Don’t make sense? Here’s the source of its origin from an article entitled ‘An Online Market Flourishes in China‘:
Internet analysts say this booming marketplace — reminiscent of the early days of eBay, when Americans started emptying their attics for online auctions — has turned Taobao into China’s newest Internet darling.
So what’s the story here? Deadline? Slow news day? Trying to think outside-the-box? What about look deeper inside and have some heart? Recently, our dear neighbor Malaysia has been busy claiming our national heritage as their own, and our government has been busy doing some work of diplomacy of defending our nation’s pride, so let’s not ruin their effort and divert the attention to some cheap plagiarism, if you want to copy, go copy the efforts, not the result, go grande!
Yes, it’s not illegal to quote from other’s piece, but it is not ethical when the writer did not link back to the original source, yes, this Tempo blogger seems to have done his own research and added some locally relevant data to make the piece relevant, but I’m not too sure if this is right at all.