An edge case of red-flagging

I hope we all agree that copying someone else's reviews from an external source, with or without attribution, is totally inappropriate unless permission has been obtained and is stated.

But what would you do in a situation like this one:

http://www.librarything.com/work/55150/reviews/16117807

where there are two reviews posted as one -- one of them inappropriately copied, the other one original?

For what it's worth, most of this user's reviews are red-flag worthy, copied with attribution but without permission. I think I'd be more inclined to cut her some slack if that weren't the case.

The first half of that is clearly a violation of copyright. It's a flag, even if there is some original content.

I would red-flag it. You might consider dropping her a private comment explaining the reason, so she can edit out the offending part.

I've flagged a bunch.

Thanks. I'm glad to see there's agreement with my inclination to red-flag; sometimes I tend to be a little over-eager.

Poking around her reviews and the "others with XXX's books" suggests that the root cause of a whole bunch of flaggable reviews was a library science class -- many of those shared books are tagged "LIS 5565" and all the reviews are copied, all with attribution. Further further examination reveals the offending course was at Florida State University, probably last fall based on the dates of the reviews. Sadly the FSU website doesn't reveal the instructor of the offending course.

I keep trying to flag my own posts as abuse instead of editing them. I did it once by mistake and now it's turned into a bad habit. I've never flagged anyone else yet though but if I spotted something like this I might message the person responsible first and then flag them if they didn't change what they had put. I'm more likely to flag someone for rudeness or meanness than anything else.

We're talking about flagging reviews rather than posts here, so it's a little different. I'm flagging these with abandon -- copyright violation is far worse than a little rudeness -- and leaving private messages on their profiles, so they can fix the issue if they're still on LT (it looks like, the offending class being over, most of them aren't).