This doesn't change the fact that Zee was (pardon my language) a snarky asshole about it on Twitter.

Hence the "drama".

To me, it's not about the Twitter drama; it's about the way The Next Web poorly cited this piece and revised it without fixing the issue people had with it in the first place.

Certainly. In my opinion an explicit quote of part of the original article would have been better than paraphrasing. Quoting reinforces the value of the source (“we couldn't write it any better”), paraphrasing does the opposite.

More like: TNW posts a non-attributed version of the article. Author complains on twitter. TNW sees this shits their pants and ninja-edits the post with poor attribution. People still complain. TNW ninja-edits the post one more time, now with proper attribution. The CEO (who looks like a total asshole in his pictures btw) posts an obvious PR Google Docs (??) letter to try and talk plagiarism good, which uses this post that tries to insinuate some kind of seconds -later-it-would-have-been-fixed-even-if-the-author-never-would-have-said-anything BS.

funnily enough...that is actually exactly what just happened and I literally (only seconds ago) discovered it. Will be putting a piece up about it soon.

Please pay attention to what else we're saying - that the second piece isn't acceptable, either.

yes I appreciate many of you agree a quote should have been included rather than an attempted rewrite.

I agree, that would have been better.

However, calling us out for plagiarism does feel far too extreme when the updated piece clearly states the source of the facts. The original piece only included links without a name and that I agree is 100% wrong. I hadn't seen that original piece before we were called out on twitter and my reactions were clearly based on immediate emotions...never a good time to reply.

Again, will put all this into a single post soon.

They are calling you out for plagiarism because your company is a plagiarist. It's just as clear as seeing a person who is burning and telling them that they are on fire, or a person who is dead and calling them deceased. You do not have the right to lift entire articles from other's sites, even if you DO give attribution.

If you as CEO have so little common sense that you don't even know what plagiarism is, then you need to step down quickly before you open your company up to lawsuits against people who actuallY DO have the money and the time to pursue a suit.

Seems odd that he could become CEO of a publishing company without knowing what plagiarism is.

Citing sources does not protect you from plagiarism. That is what I mean by the second version is not okay. If the lesson you're learning here is "I just need to make sure we link to the original" then you're learning the wrong lesson.

It would be sort of funny if you included copy/pasted comments from HN in your PR-cleanup post.

Yes, you attributed. But you very deliberately copied the article and posted it as your own work. You can't even say that you forgot to add quote marks as the text was slightly altered - evidently to give you an "out" if anyone accused you of direct copying.

Your threats afterward made things worse - much worse. Not understanding plagiarism (go look up the dictionary, or Wikipedia already!) whilst being an edito of a publication just makes this bad thing horrendous.

Make a full apology. Don't do it again.

Zee, I think it's pretty ridiculous that you're even getting the slightest bit annoyed about this. Needless to say, we'll be saying well clear of anything your are involved with in future. http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/23049725899/plagiarism

Do you honestly not understand why even your "ninja-edited" version of the post is not acceptable?

Real life needs some serious mutexing.