5 ms·

It has been drilled into us that plagiarism is theft and therefore bad, but there is nothing more natural in the world than taking others work and building on i

• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Plagiarism is wildly overrated. I remember in middle/high school writing research papers for English class. I spent more time trying to NOT plagiarize than I spent on any other aspect of the paper. Which doubly absurd when you consider that there is literally not a single original thought a 14 year old is capable of having with respect to the War of 1812. When the entirety of my knowledge on a subject is based on a half dozen sources how the hell can I not plagiarize. In that instance I say plagiarize away! Focus on idea sharing. On how to explain complex ideas to your classmates. On how to build consistent abstractions or arguments. On literally anything other than how to rewrite the three sentences so it says the same thing as those three sentences but with different words so you don't get kicked out of school.
  • jmduke 11y ago
    This sounds like a failure of your teacher/grader, not like a failure of the idea of plagiarism, though? > Focus on idea sharing. On how to explain complex ideas to your classmates. On how to build consistent abstractions or arguments. 100% agreed! And I think most cogent interpretations of plagiarism would say that if you're able to do those things then you're not plagiarising, you're building off of other sources (providing that you cite them correctly). (It's entirely possible that I've been lucky, and that my teachers/professors took unusually rational stances when it came to this kind of thing. But it feels like you're presenting a false dichotomy.)
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago
    All ideas are built upon. There is a very clear line between simply copy pasting an idea and reformulating that idea in your own words. I agree that we should focus more on coming up with ideas independently, and that if they so happen to coincide with an idea someone came up before, no big deal. In today's diverse world, however, what are the chances that you were even remotely going to say something word for word how someone else before you said it?
    • halo 11y ago
      Why do we care so much about reformulating ideas in our own words? If someone expresses an idea in a good way, why shouldn't we be able to repeat it verbatim without being raked over hot coals for it?
      • slvv 11y ago
        You can totally repeat excellent wording verbatim! It's just that you have to add quotation marks and cite your source.
        • halo 11y ago
          That's my contention - why? Isn't that slavish devotion to quoting and sourcing all turns of phrase somewhat limiting? Why do we irrationally consider plagiarism such a horrible blight to be eradicated at all costs?
          • Karunamon 11y ago
            Respect for your reader, for one. Citations ensure your reader knows that: A) It isn't your original thought or original words B) They can look up some certain work by the person if they're interested in more There's no doubt some level of it that's just academic elitism (don't even get me started on "authoritative sources"), but not deceiving your reader is a good portion of the requirement. It's not just about the fact that you used someone else's words, it's the fact that you did so, and passed off that work as your own.
  • pdpi 11y ago
    You don't need to have _original_ ideas. You can summarise the ideas from some other source (or, ideally, sources). In summarising, you make some choices as to what you think is important, and what you think is immaterial. You explain the core concepts in your own words, maybe differently from the source material. And, if you're quoting from a specific source verbatim, you acknowledge it. Plagiarism is not about the copying in and of itself. It's about appropriating somebody else's work and pretending it's yours.
  • mcguire 11y ago
    Note that plagiarism involves not citing your sources. How do you feel when someone claims your ideas as their own?
    • forrestthewoods 11y ago
      Probably nothing. I wouldn't even know. My blog has around a million views lifetime. I've no idea if anyone has claimed any ideas as their own. Maybe? Thus far it's not hurt me. I've taken tons of ideas from Stack Overflow. All programmers have. How often do we include citations back? Sometimes! If the code is clever and non-obvious. But generally speaking there's nothing. How did I know to use this bit of API goodness? No one knows! It's a mystery!
• sigmar 11y ago
  >It has been drilled into us that plagiarism is theft and therefore bad, but there is nothing more natural in the world than taking others work and building on it or sharing it. While I generally agree with this sentence. It is fairly obvious that he wasn't "building on it and sharing it." It seems he was changing a few words then putting his name on it and profiting by selling the intellectual property (that he doesn't own).
  • halo 11y ago
    Disagree, the core contention is he was copying clue themes from past puzzles (or self-plagiarising, which is a slightly different issue), not copying entire puzzles. That's a far cry from what you describe. I don't really have a huge problem with that, even if he's selling it. Yes, it's plagiarism, yes, it's copying, yes, it's considered "intellectual property theft". No, I don't see why it should be considered such a big deal, nor do I think every crossword benefits from being created entirely from scratch at additional effort. If someone comes up with a great clue theme and someone notices a few years later and reuses it for others to enjoy, why should I get angry about plagiarism rather that feel happy that a great idea has been shared?
    • waqf 11y ago
      If he had credited the original authors appropriately, your position would be quite tenable.
      • halo 11y ago
        Why is my position, that our slavish obsession with plagiarism is counter-productive, untenable? Especially given that plagiarism inherently implies a lack of credit.
    • sigmar 11y ago
      >Disagree, the core contention is he was copying clue themes from past puzzles That isn't the "core contention" >More broadly, 1,090 Universal puzzles and 447 USA Today puzzles were at least a 75 percent match to an earlier puzzle in the database. (Sometimes the match is with a puzzle from the same publication.) and though it may have been "self-plagiarizing" legally. Ethically, I have to wonder whether Parker was getting paid for the "original" crosswords that were submitted or if he was only using pseudonyms to falsely illustrate that the crosswords were original works.
• blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  In music, art, and dance, you will see themes inspired if not outright copied; that's the reason for the existence of styles. Rock and roll music is full of borrowed riffs, copied drum patterns, etc. Almost all 70's disco music used very similar drum patterns. I think this kind of thing is OK and necessary, actually, to allow an art form to evolve. But to wholesale copy 90% or 95% of someone's creation, as in some of the examples in the article, crosses a line. Imagine someone wholesale copying the famous opening guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven -- there would be outrage from the fans, and undoubtedly a lawsuit would follow. I think the only reason this fellow Parker has gotten away with it for so long is that he's in a more obscure field where it's a lot less obvious to uncover plagiarism without an intentional check, as someone has finally done. “We don’t look at anybody else’s puzzles or really care about anyone else’s puzzles,” Parker said. I don't believe that for one second. Someone in the profession for all these years, and he never looks at NYT puzzles?
  • halo 11y ago
    Led Zeppelin famously copied, adapted and evolved others people's songs, leading to legal issues on songs including Stairway to Heaven. I'm suggesting they had it right in the first place and our obsession with "plagiarism" is wrong-headed.
  • deveac 11y ago
    You must have been being coy when you wrote that ;) Led Zeppelin Loses First Round of Plagarism Lawsuit: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/led-zeppelin-loses-first-round-in-stairway-to-heaven-plagiarism-lawsuit/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/led-zeppelin-loses-first-round-i...
• mikeash 11y ago
  Plagiarism isn't merely taking someone else's work. Plagiarism is a lack of acknowledgment that you've done so. It's lying by omission, not theft. You can even plagiarize yourself, by taking something you did before and presenting it as something new.
• harshreality 11y ago
  I'm going to focus on plagiarism in non-fiction. In some circumstances, readers need to be able to evaluate an author's work for originality or contribution to the state of the art. If paraphrased or word-for-word ideas aren't quoted, the reader doesn't know if the line of argument is 1% new or 100% new. Plagiarism—in a context where someone's work is being evaluated (generally, in academia or non-fiction publishing)—is a deliberate confusion of who contributed what to the argument being made. Which matters for evaluation of rationally presented ideas, to understand where arguments are coming from so criticism of those ideas can be located more easily. If the thesis is taken from someone else, that's a gross abuse of academic standards. If you want to defend someone else's thesis on different grounds than they defended it, you can do so, but it should be made explicit that that's what you're doing, which entails citing the source of the thesis in some explicit way. Furthermore, by citing sources, if a reader appreciates one line of thought but not what's built around it, they can go to that other source or author and start down a different path. Failing to cite sources makes that more difficult. IF it's recognized as most likely a quote, and IF the original source has high pagerank, it's easy to find. If not, you have to go consult academics in the area in question to see if they recognize it, or query the author to do what he or she should have done in the first place: cite the source. I don't view it as theft, or anything like that. More like abuse or a waste of the reader's time and intellectual effort in trying to evaluate a complex argument without hints about the geneology of the component ideas.