Last night Jeanne0o0 posted something on Twitter about yet more material being posted on James Ray's site that really doesn't flatter him. Loathe as I am to give him more traffic, I peeked. I was about three paragraphs in to this blog post before I said to myself, not only isn't this flattering, there's no way it was penned by James Ray or any of his help meets. It's way too well-written. So I googled some of the text and discovered that it came from Prescott eNews. I've cited this publication many times in blog posts following the James Ray debacle. The reportage is always excellent and this article is no exception. So, in that sense, I guess it's no surprise that he stole it. Let's face it. Misappropriating other people's intellectual property is what he does. Just ask Stan Grof inventor of Holotropic Breathwork or Lance Giroux of the Samurai Game®.
Not only was there no link or any other attribution to the original, the article was not excerpted. It was republished in full, which you cannot do without permission. I couldn't find an email address for Lynne LaMaster of Prescott eNews on the site but I found her on Twitter and shot her a tweet to see if she knew her article was now on Ray's blog and if she'd given permission. She had not.
This morning she tweeted that she had posted a comment on both her site and James Ray's blog calling for removal of the plagiarized material. But when I looked at James Ray's blog, I found that Lynn LaMaster's comment had been removed. Her article had not. JaneLWilcox confirmed that the comment had appeared there earlier this morning.
Here is LaMaster's comment as it appears on her site:
Here is the emptiness left by the removed comment on Ray's blog:
The only question now is how many Cheneys this gets on the Cook's Source mendacity scale. If you're not familiar with Wil Wheaton's brilliant proposal regarding the Cook's Source scandal, see here. In that case it was the publisher of a small, local food magazine who lifted an internet article and then insisted that anything on the internet was public domain. Maybe that's what James Ray and/or his staff think. Because as of this writing Lynne LaMaster's article is still posted on James Ray's blog without attribution and without her comment alerting them to her knowledge of their plagiarism.
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