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Yes, plagiarism is wrong. 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
by MereInterest 7y ago
Yes, plagiarism is wrong.
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.
- aleister_777 7y agoI had similar takeaways but could not have phrased it nearly this well. Thanks.
- comboy 7y agoI'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. 1. http://paulgraham.com/genius.html http://paulgraham.com/genius.html
- capableweb 7y agoI 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.
- kiba 7y agoI am sorry, what? Open source software license does not generally allow such thing.
- Sinergy2 7y agoThe GPL variants, for example, require you to allow others to plagiarize your work.
- kiba 7y agoNo. As far as I know, it doesn't.
- ensignavenger 7y agoThe 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.
- capableweb 7y agoI 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)