Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism

Moving on... it looks like Wired editor Chris Anderson plagiarized some passages in his new book Free from...
Wikipedia! "We have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources," blogs Waldo Jaquith, who broke the news and details the infractions at VQR Online.
"Free as in copied!" quips The Noisy Channel."

The irony speaks for itself," snarks Gawker.
It's an embarrassing oversight for the normally meticulous editor, Fast Company Techwatch says. At his own blog The Long Tail, Anderson admits: "This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication."

He said there was back-and-forth with his publisher about how to credit the Wikipedia passages he pasted, and ultimately a formatting snafu and lost footnotes."

The part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all."

Ok, coolio--now you can go buy a book called Free that's packed with information you can read for free online.

And in a plagiarism twofer, Elisabeth Hasselbeck of The View has been sued for copyright infringement by a woman who claims Hasselbeck used swiped material in The G Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide "But let's get to the larger point: Did anyone ever think Elisabeth Hasselbeck actually wrote that whole book herself?" wonders Daily Intel.