Intentionally copying the work of someone else, letter by letter, with the goal of getting some kind of reward, can be seen as morally wrong.
But from there down you have a lot of shades of gray, can seven musical notes be taken as plagiarism if you do a different song with a sucession of notes that you didn't know from where they came (for you may be indistingishable from your own creation), or that you never heard before? Or a full phrase, in a different context, or a "common sense" algorythm to solve a common problem with not so many ways to solve it?
When you are not doing a full copy, at some point you reach the level of meme transmission, something that makes us humans, enabled the emergence of civilization and let us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or worse, with just independent, but similar enough, work, putting laws penalizing that turns creation into a potential trap for whoever that doesn't have an army of lawyers already.
Plagiarism has more of a claim to being morally wrong than copyright violation, I would say. The notion of copyright only arose a few centuries ago, and even today a significant part of the world doesn’t really get the concept deep down. But when it comes to plagiarism, we have attestations even from antiquity (Martial, for instance) of creators complaining about their work being passed off as that of someone else.
Here's a thought: What if there is a one or two categories missing from attributing or not attributing?
For a piece of work you could have:
1) Attributes the sources of works that comprise it. Honest, cannot think of a situation that it is inappropriate for people not bound by national security considerations and the like.
2) Does not attribute but explicitly states that they did not write it. Honest, but better to attribute. Not appropriate for anywhere the author needs to demonstrate their skill, such as academia. Not appropriate for things that explicitly or implicitly require attribution.
3) Does not attribute but it is implicit they didn't create it themselves. Limited applicability to things that the original author doesn't mind people spreading. Sharing jokes, memes and political slogans are obvious uses of this.
4) Doesn't attribute author and implicitly or explicitly gives the impression they were the original author. Traditional plagiarism. Utterly dishonest.
The usefulness of having these two extra categories (2 and 3) are that they differentiate between honest and dishonest people and that authors may want to release their works under a license that says they cannot claim they wrote the work themselves, thereby reducing the burden of future distributors of altered works having to include an ever-growing list of attributions as derived works move from person to person.
I can understand a 6 year old being confused. They (maybe) aren't old enough to grasp that actually composing something like a poem is the hard part. At that age, memorizing and writing it down can seem like an impressive feat all by itself, possibly even more impressive than the composing part. All the more true for a kid under the circumstances described (challenges with English due to immigrating, etc).
With an adult, though...I'd think they'd understand the concept of taking credit for someone else's work being not ok.
I'm not fan of the way intellectual property law works (in particular the way it is shoehorned into a free market system which only works efficiently on scarce goods with non-zero marginal cost, which IP is not), but still. This isn't really about intellectual property per se. It's still wrong to claim you came up with things for which the copyright is long expired or never existed. It is dishonest, and it is cheating.
This article presents an interesting childhood misunderstanding, and a misunderstanding by adults of how a child might think (I tend to think the teacher was rather cruel), and then spins it as if the child's point of view is sophisticated enough to be a valid adult view. But it obviously isn't.
As I understand the story, it wasn't really about "taking credit". The kid did not deny the poem was from a book, they just didn't understand it wasn't supposed to be.
It was probably more a case of misunderstanding expectations. Some tradition of education have a large emphasis on knowledge and memorization, while others have more emphasis on personal creativity.
The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net
Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of examples that I've found with basic automated searching just in matches to my own personal code). I have found some seriously absurd examples where an entire portfolio consists of my code, and the person got a job from it at a large company.
Compare a student who writes their own code to the student who plagiarizes.
If you're the non-copy-pasta student, you're competing with the fakes for jobs.
If you're an employer, you're tasked with figuring out who is who, and I strongly doubt you would personally want the copy-paster at your business for both legal and productivity reasons.
I think some people confuse plagiarism and innovation, especially when we start to wrap in "intellectual property" into it.
Plagiarism is a shortcut used to fake skills/credentials.
Innovation is a real skill, though could be debated I am sure.
Intellectual property value is up for debate.
People who are cheating/faking their way, lying about their value/skills harms both employers and students.
Just don't let people debating about plagiarism try to sneak in innovation/building-upon as a means of a straw man.
We're talking copy and paste here. Maybe some synonym swaps.
It’s hard to draw the line though. Is using stack overflow’s answers wrong? What about getting an algorithm from a text book? Obviously lifting an entire course is wrong. But nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially code, which feels more like math then English.
When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.
To me, it just doesn't seem like it's even remotely challenging to figure out how to do this, or when to do this. If it's not yours, say where you got it.
When in doubt, cite it. What exactly would the harm be if you cited something when you weren't sure if it was necessary, anyway?
> When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.
You do this? That is very impressive. I have never meant anyone who did that. Myself included.
I tend to put a link to the SO answer in a comment. That way whoever is looking at it later (mostly me in a few months) can understand what prompted that solution.
"Give with an open hand, and stop thinking about the tokens with which you will be repaid. Be happy to be worth stealing from. The future owes you nothing."
I see ideas like this regularly on HN, yet when it comes to the GNU/GPL, violators are regularly excoriated. If you don't care about plagiarism, you shouldn't care about a company making money on code you decided to give out for free.
My point is that people that write these articles quickly change their mind when the plagiarism enriches someone they don't like, disagree with politically, or just don't feel deserves to profit off of it.
HN does not have very unified views. I personally don’t care about GPL violations, but I am also not clicking on these stories you’re talking about so I don’t even see these HN discussions.
Sounds like a bad apology from someone who got caught passing of others work as their own. Yes plagiarism is wrong, and no it’s not the entirety of academia that is wrong because you can’t get by without talent through just copying other people’s work.
Lots of knowledge (I’d say most) was handed out to modern us as a result of what today would be called plagiarists. It’s true, there was no grant system in the European Middle Ages and I guess the smart folk in Baghdad were also not that interested in being original or being seen as inventors/creators.
The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird.
The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals, rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.
The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas, but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation, subverting this heuristic.
The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads. In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano Formula.
In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept is severely flawed.
I'm too lazy to read the article (hey at least I'm honest), but I think you can have a working science/news with plagiarism.
In our western culture everything is egocentric. You work hard to be remembered for milenia for wonderful things that you've done. We try to mention who first observed or invented something (even though it often happens in multiple places at once and only the most popular and best marketed person gets the mention), but those people rarely care. Mostly because they are dead, but also PG's latest essay[1].
You can have equally valid, working and moral system where it's rewarding enough when your pattern is getting spread rather than anybody caring that it was made by you. It seems to even be going in that direction with the youngest generation, memes and stuff.
And reputation still works. You assign weight to given entity based on previous information that it provided. Whether it was "invented" or merely repeated doesn't matter.
I am not convinced reputation would work the same way, or that plagiarism isn't bad, but I definitely agree with the ego-centrism in the modern scientific world. I personally think it is a moral hazard and is something that discourages and robs the enjoyment of many people in the field. It is better to focus on the beauty of the ideas than the "beauty" of the reputation of the one who proposed the ideas.
I think you bring up good points. I think the only difference between Open Source and Proprietary software is that one you're allowed to plagiarize, and the other you're not. In the end, Open Source wins as it automatically gets way more exposure and users, as anyone can access, copy, modify and freely share it forever.
I know we won't be able to get an answer to this question unless it actually goes to court (and I haven't seen anything about this any court), but couldn't you take any MIT licensed project, replace the license with your own and it'd be legal? My understanding is the license means you're allowed to freely modify anything related to the project (unless someone has a trademark/copyright of course)
The GPLv3 specifically requires copyright notices to be kept in tact on verbatim copies. Other popular Open Source licenses have more stringent attribution requirements. Plagiarism is definitely not inherent to Open Source, though it may be inherent in some licenses.
The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird.
The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals, rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.
The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas, but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation, subverting this heuristic.
The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads. In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano Formula.
In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept is severely flawed.
> “ American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were jealous that you could do it.”
Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?
Plagiarism is a fancy word but cheating is something that kids by that age should understand.
Also that’s a pretty darn nasty and entitled attitude from an immigrant family, who should have been grateful for the country which received them.
> I have a simple recommendation for you: do a half-decent job teaching undergraduates.
Part of teaching well is sending the message that cheating is not tolerated. It is demoralizing and stressful for honest, hard working students to see others cheat and blow the curve.
> There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is inscribed.
Pardon the snarkiness, but there doesn’t seem to have been a moral foundation put down in the case of this author. Yes, if parents and educators don’t build and reinforce that foundation, then there won’t be any.
> > “ American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were jealous that you could do it.”
> Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?
Yeah, yikes.
Aside from growing up with a mother who will readily defend cheating, it must also be easier to cheat and plagiarize if you're taught to view others with such contempt.
"Similarly, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a system in which we stop crediting the original source of the
idea—one would just need to find a way to make it practicable. There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is
inscribed."
I think that's the main point of the article, and I agree that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that.
The problem is just that this can lead to other problems.
One of them is lying; if you say that you made something you didn't, you are lying.
Another one is that you can get rewarded for something you didn't make; it could be e.g. money or a job.
So in order to make it practicable we would have to find a way to either avoid all those other problems,
or to make the change so small that we don't get those problems but in that case
I don't know if there would practically be any difference.
> It is true that I did not know about “intellectual property,” but even if I had, that would not have helped. . . But what if I want to go around quoting Hamlet and claiming the words as my own? In that case, there’s no issue of depriving Shakespeare or his immediate descendants of the money that is rightfully theirs. It is at that point that plagiarism norms kick in.
The author seems to think that copyright is just about economic rights, but in reality it also confers moral rights.
For example, the Berne convention states: "independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work".
You cannot justify violating the right to attribution/recognition of authorship on the grounds that it does not cause any financial loss to the author - they are independent rights.
Yes, obviously IMO. Surprised I haven’t seen it mentioned here yet but the chief reason plagiarism is wrong in my view is that it’s typically employed in situations in which the finished work is used to “certify” the ability to prepare the finished work. By “stealing” that finished work, the plagiarizer is granted credentials that they don’t deserve, thereby rotting their given institution from within by being granted prestige without the expected concomitant skill to match. It’s institutional poison IMO
I think part of the problem here is that universities have repurposed the word "plagiarism" to include forms of cheating which it doesn't naturally cover.
For example, if a student pays someone else to write an essay, nowadays that gets classified as plagiarism. But it's hard to see it as a theft of ideas, any more than it's theft if I buy something from a shop.
Plagiarism is to misrepresent something as authored by yourself. Whether you paid someone else for writing it or copied it without permission does not matter for the plagiarism charge - the wrongdoing is the misrepresentation.
It is not the same as copyright infringement - although it might be both at the same time if you copy something without permission and publish it under your own name.
Plagiarism is not always illegal. Publishing a book which is ghostwritten by someone else is not illegal AFAIK (as long as they get paid). But in education and research it is illegal - and they don't care if you bought the material fairly, the point is that decisions (grades, hiring, funding etc.) are based on the assumption that the material reflects your abilities.
So it is not really "theft of ideas", it is "faking credentials".
One of the issues that makes this murkier is that it is often only social norms and expectations that determine whether someone is misrepresenting themselves. In the meme world, the whole purpose is to share and modify slightly. There isn't an expectation that your post is original. In the academic world, every single word is assumed to be original unless cited otherwise. There are areas in between these cases, and often what someone calls a violation is merely the case of someone misreading the social norms.
I agree fully. I left academia because of exactly this reason.
While academics have high morale on not stealing more than four words in the same sequence, they don't have any issue putting their names first on some engineers idea.
There are more than just two parties to plagiarism. In the example given, the student buying an essay has not wronged the student who wrote the essay, anymore than a politician has wronged their speechwriter. However, when they turn in that essay for credit in a class, they have wronged the university by fraudulently representing it as theirs. The cost of the degree is in work that they have personally completed, not work that they have subcontracted out. This is the reputation that has been stolen, that has been inappropriately assigned to the plagiarist.
Where I would agree with your general statement is the concept of "self-plagiarism", typically defined as submitting the same work for credit in multiple forums. Plagiarism requires a third party whose work is being passed off, and self-plagiarism is an oxymoron.
Certainly the student has wronged the university, but to my mind it's the same kind of wrong as if they'd smuggled a calculator in to an arithmetic test. That also lets the student gain a reputation they didn't deserve.
I would prefer to reserve "plagiarism" for the case where the true originator of the ideas is potentially being eclipsed.
(Incidentally, according to my local university's academic misconduct policy, if the vice-chancellor uses a speechwriter without crediting them they are indeed a plagiarist. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me, though I suspect it may not be enforced, but I would prefer to use a different term.)
Would it be better to deprecate the world plagiarism and fork it into the words cheating and reputation stealing? To me, that would ultimately be more accurate, because it better encapsulates the harm involved.
One place where I think most people don't mind a little plagiarism is in joke telling. I can't tell you how many Dad Jokes I've found on the Internet and passed off as my own, and I think there's sort of an understanding that if you read a joke off a Laffy Taffy wrapper, you now get to tell that joke to others without attribution.
That said, in the professional comedy world, there's the idea of joke theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft and I think most people recognize that as more clearly an example of cheating.
Why did the author write his name in the article if the argument is that attributing any kind of ownership or provenance is without value? It's almost as if the author cares about his original work.
> outrage against plagiarists is about protecting idea-creators, not readers.
The author states this, but then says nothing to elaborate on their claim or justify it. As a "user" of academic writings, it is extremely annoying to come across stuff that's not referenced properly, has been gratuitously-reinvented in a way that fractures the lit on some topic, etc. It's bad enough when these things happen casually or by mistake, imagine if people actually started doing it on purpose, merely to claim credit on others' achievements. Treating this as a "moral" crusade of sorts seems to be totally justified.
Interesting that a philosophy column on an ethical issue talks a lot about legality in the first half. I guess it speaks to an optimistic attitude about the role of law.
I love this bit in the references:
"1. Any resemblances between this essay and Brian L. Frye’s forthcoming article “Plagiarize This Paper” (IDEA: The IP Law Review https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3462144) are probably due to the fact that I plagiarized it in several places."
Incidentally, these auto-plagiarism-detection systems that academic journals use seem to go overboard. You 're not allowed to quote yourself, and sometimes they detect completely silly things. It's just not possible not to plagiarize "serial section electron tomography".
I would hope these automated systems are being used with human oversight, anyways.
I've heard some anecdotes of students dealing with TurnItIn's flimsiness, with the professor/teacher being too stubborn to actually re-evaluate what the tool thinks is plagarism. But most professors out there are going to see that the tool isn't perfect.
Another annoying thing is that university plagiarism policies seem to have been largely written by humanities departments without thinking very hard about the needs of others.
Taken literally, my local university's plagiarism policy says it would be "academic misconduct" for a mathematics undergraduate to reproduce a known proof of a theorem in an examination without identifying a source. Unless things have changed greatly, this is not in fact expected of them.
Lets copy this article under my domain name, attribute it to me and link to it on hackernews. Plagiarism withdraws many incentives to create (not only financial) and is therefore morally wrong. Copying memes is good since it allows confrontation and emergence of best memes. But you also need incentives to create, being money (sensible copyright) or fame (attibution)
I think the author is making a good point here, though overstating the case. Remember, plagiarism in academia isn’t just stealing an entire paper and claiming it’s yours. In my narrow sub field, probably the first three sentences of every paper’s introduction could be identical, but if I copied those from another paper that’s plagiarism. Likewise, if my paper built on a useful equation from another’s work, and I copied the explanation directly from that paper, it’s plagiarism. Yet as the author said, this does little disservice to the reader. These rules are more about properly maintaining an academic measure of merit.
But while this is a great point, we shouldn’t abandon the problem of plagiarism all together. Instead, just start with your moral system, say utilitarian or a Kantian ethic, and then put it to the test. For certain, some systems will find it intrinsically immortal regardless of the social context.
I teach college and often public speaking. Practically all college students know that wholesale plagiarism is wrong but many of them still don't know how to cite their sources.
I tell them any time you use information from another source you need to say the source even if you use the same source 2-3 sentences in a row. Every time I hear you give a statistic I ask myself, "Did you give a source for that?" We do exercises where I give them paragraphs without citations and ask them to identify all the ones that need citations. I have them do impromptu speeches on summarizing an article and citing it multiple times. I explain the difference between a source and a citation. I tell them I don't care about a works cited slide. If I don't hear them say the source it doesn't count.
Many of them still give statistics without citing them.
But from there down you have a lot of shades of gray, can seven musical notes be taken as plagiarism if you do a different song with a sucession of notes that you didn't know from where they came (for you may be indistingishable from your own creation), or that you never heard before? Or a full phrase, in a different context, or a "common sense" algorythm to solve a common problem with not so many ways to solve it?
When you are not doing a full copy, at some point you reach the level of meme transmission, something that makes us humans, enabled the emergence of civilization and let us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or worse, with just independent, but similar enough, work, putting laws penalizing that turns creation into a potential trap for whoever that doesn't have an army of lawyers already.