Today, in copycat news: First off, The View's Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who recently published The G Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide, has been sued for copyright infringement by a woman named Susan Hassett, a self-published author who'd sent Hasselbeck a copy of her own book, Living with Celiac Disease, last year. "If these allegations / charges are proven in a court of law then I'll just have more reason to be annoyed by Elisabeth," writes MamaPop. TMZ has a copy of the letter Hassett's lawyer wrote to Hasselbeck, and Gawker lists some of the similarities between the two books, though they're "not terribly certain just how many ways there are to write a book about Celiac Disease and diet." "But let's get to the larger point: Did anyone ever think Elisabeth Hasselbeck actually wrote that whole book herself?" wonders Daily Intel. "That she hunkered down in her kitchen and crafted recipes to hand-make gluten-free bread? Or that she typed out every paragraph and period herself?" And the opinion from the experts, Gluten-Free NYC: "Both books almost inevitably seem to repackage advice that was already 'in the air' before their dates of publication."

Meanwhile, the Virginia Quarterly Review Blog reports that "In the course of reading Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources...Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia." Anderson himself responded, writing back, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources." But Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits says the problem is more serious than the VQR realized: "A cursory plunge into the book's contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes -- in some cases, nearly verbatim." TechWatch also wonders why Anderson would rely on Wikipedia so much in the first place: "even middle-school book-reports shouldn't be crafted with ancillary information from that site." Obvious punchline: "Apparently," writes Amnesia Blog, "Chris Anderson thinks everything should be free."