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If you said yes, that's because they are exactly the same article. Apparently everything you learned from school about not plagiarizing other people's work doesn't always hold true in the real world. Recently, Goboz.com, a local knockoff of Citysearch.com, included on its website word-for-word copies of restaurant reviews from Portland Food Carts, another Portland-based website launched just a week and a half ago. The founder and owner of the Portland Food Carts website, who calls herself "Cuisine Bonne Femme" told WW that Goboz stole and posted several restaurant reviews and listings from her website "verbatim without [her] permission, without linking to [her] site, or without crediting [her] as the author.
In a series of emails obtained by WW, Cuisine Bonne Femme told the CEO and founder of Goboz, Jeremiah Kastner, to "immediately and completely remove any and all materials from Portland Food Carts' website" that were posted on Goboz. Kastner responded with an apology and told Bonne Femme that Goboz would remove the articles immediately. Although Kastner did not respond to WW's request for an interview, he told Bonne Femme through email that the website's "bot" had grabbed Portland Food Carts' listings and posted them on Goboz.
The "bot" Kastner was referring to is a type of program, similar to the "spiders" that search engines use, that crawls the Web looking for content to include in the website's database. This practice, known as screenscraping, has become common among websites that collect online event and entertainment information—but such sites generally remove content, such as copied reviews, that might violate copyright.
Bonne Femme doesn't buy Kastner's explanation: She told WW Goboz is clearly lying about their bot automatically picking up and posting [her] content" on the Goboz website. "There's no bot on the planet that will take material and individually put the entire thing up without a link to the original," she says. Instead, Bonne Femme believes that someone at Goboz is "cutting, pasting, and posting [her content] manually."
WW's own online hunting appears to support Bonne Femme's viewpoint. Goboz's review for RingSide Steakhouse, for instance, contains the first two lines of the Ringside review by Liz Crain (who freelances for WW as well) on the Portland AOL City Guide website, but omits the rest of the review.
Goboz's RingSide review:
AOL's review:
This isn't the first time Goboz has taken material from other local websites. Bonne Femme says she found at least 10 of her articles on Kastner's site. She also says that Goboz has done the same thing to writer Joanna Miller at the Portland food and drink website and has even taken material from The Oregonian's online review site. Many descriptions come directly from individual restaurant sites like this one from Marrakesh Moroccan Restaurant. In fact, there is no evidence that Kastner (who calls himself "Jemima" on his website) has posted any original content whatsoever.
Bonne Femme says the whole episode has been especially upsetting since her website has been up for only a week and a half and she doesn't get paid for all her hard work. She says it made her feel like her "identity was stolen…like [she has] been violated at the very core of what it means to be a writer. To have someone blatantly take my material in this manner and try to claim it as their own… it's just unethical and scummy on their part."
Although WW didn't find any posts directly taken from our website without attribution (yet), we've got a beef with Kastner as well: He called us "Willamette Weekly" on his site's link to our news feed. Well, sir, our name is Willamette Week, thank you very much.
WWeek 2015