Once again, the Tourism Authority of Thailand has done a Copy, Paste, Steal.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand today posted an event on their Facebook Amazing Thailand page.  The description of the event is a word-for-word copy of information post on Wikipedia.

Here is a screenshot of the Tourism Authority of Thailand stolen material:

Tourism Authority of Thailand Stolen Text

You can see the exact verbiage at the Wikipedia Royal Ploughing Page.

Yes, Wikipedia is open source, and anyone can use the information.  However, and it is BIG however, there is a Creative Commons License that states:

• Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.

This basically means that you cannot claim the work as your own as the Tourism Authority of Thailand has done.

This is from the terms of use at Wikipedia:

• Attribution: To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikimedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users.

This states that a link to the source must be provided.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) does neither.  Instead they claim the work as their own.  And, to think, the Pacific Asian Travel Association (PATA) gave TAT an award for Social Media.  Steal someone else’s work and get an award.

This is plain and simple plagiarism – stealing work and not properly attributing.  Something that the Tourism of Authority of Thailand does on a regular basis.

I guess the 5.4 Billion Baht annual budget isn’t enough to hire staff that can actually write a few sentences in proper English instead of stealing work from others.

All I can do is hope that one of these days, someone gets pissed off enough and threatens legal action against the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

Tags: copy copyright incompetent paste plagiarism steal tat.wikipedia theft tourism authority of thailand