Cooks Source editor pledges more caution about copyright; future of magazine in doubt

Though her original “apology” was nothing of the sort, and her subsequent one still left something to be desired, Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs has since expressed what sounds like more real remorse for using work by Monica Gaudio without permission, in an interview with the Daily Hampshire Gazette. However, it may be too late. After the deluge of negative publicity her small regional magazine received after her comments circulated on the Internet, the future of the magazine is in some doubt.

Looking back, Griggs said she regrets her use of language and appeared deeply remorseful in an interview about publishing the piece without permission. She said she had planned to call Gaudio about using her work but was too caught up in putting out her November edition and let it go. Attempts to reach Gaudio for comment were unsuccessful.

"I’m beyond words sorry, and it’s not just because I got caught. It just wasn’t right," Griggs said in the interview at her home Thursday, as she struggled with her emotions in front of a computer screen showing hundreds of harassing emails. "The only problem that I have here is I’m overwhelmed."

Griggs says that her Facebook page was “hacked” (though a commenter casts doubt on that claim, suggesting that Griggs erroneously referred to the thousands of angry comment posters as “hackers” when her page was not actually hacked as such at all) and received over 400 e-mails. She also received more than 100 phone calls and ended up having to disconnect her phone.

The magazine has lost a number of advertisers, and some of them are still skittish. Griggs said she would meet with advertisers and apologize to them during her monthly 900-mile magazine distribution trip this weekend.

The magazine is a small, 10,000-circulation 2-person operation run by Griggs and her adult daughter, and does not earn enough to pay writers. Griggs notes that she often has publicists send her copies of books for her to publish excerpts in the magazine.

"They want me to run them because that sells books," Griggs said. "We feel like we sell a lot of books."

In one relationship she has with a publicist, Griggs said she is allowed to use 250 words from a book and three recipes. Although she said she has shortcomings when it comes to understanding copyright laws, Griggs said she has always viewed the republication of recipes as a "gray area,"

It’s true that republication of recipes could be a gray area—after all, copyright covers expressions of facts, not the facts themselves. If you express a recipe in a different way, it could theoretically pass muster.

But what got Griggs in trouble was not simply republishing recipes, but republishing an entire article without permission. And she could probably have gotten away with that if she had simply apologized as Monica asked at the outset. But instead, she responded with a display of hubris that couldn’t have done more to provoke Internet rage than if she had meant for it to—and aggravated it further with her first responses to the publicity. It apparently took some time for the seriousness of the situation to sink in—by which point it might well be too late for the continued existence of the magazine.

Griggs says that the magazine is going to be a lot more careful in the future about where its sources come from, and has even severed relationships with one writer who was apparently prone to unattributed borrowing. But the future of the magazine is still in doubt.

It used to be that plagiarism in publications could go unnoticed for years if the people who read it didn’t happen to be familiar with the original sources of the plagiarized material. After all, media was locked in its paper form, and couldn’t be so easily put together and collated with other sources. But the electronic publishing revolution is changing that. Google and quotation marks make it quite easy to discover where specific phrases have been used before.

But at the same time, people like Griggs confuse the ease of access to information on the Internet with the right to use that information, and end up producing scandals. And the prevalence of remix culture, in which people build new works of art out of pieces of the old irrespective of whether copyright law allows it, tends to confuse things for everybody.

Another noteworthy point is that the Internet made it possible for a wrong to be detected and addressed entirely by the community, without need for costly and time-consuming legal remedies. Under pressure from a horde of justice-minded Internet users, Graggs acceded to Gaudio’s request for a journalism-school donation in the amount she would have been paid.

Of course, this is not entirely a good thing; there is a reason that “mob justice” has negative connotations.