long and boring rant about plagiarism, honesty

one thing that terrifies me is the idea of plagiarism, although like most people, i have plagiarised all my life. i share ideas i did not come up with, i do not end every quote with the author, i do not name every source or even know the name of every source, i occasionally gossip, and i speak as freely as i can bring myself to under the circumstances.

i try to go out of my way to give credit where credit is due because i believe in that, but the idea that i am accidentally taking someone else's words and presenting them as my own still bothers me.

i wanted to change my sig (eventually,) to something along the lines of "literalism is poison." the fact that we all read and reference our own thoughts in the context of what we read, and interpret what we read in the context of our own existing thoughts, (instead of the more conventional view of language as a way of copying an idea from one person to another) is something that i don't think people consider often enough. moreover, it is (literally, i think) the deadliest trend to ever find its way into religion. it makes everyone wrong but the person talking, (for instance, god, and only one person reading what he said) and that's going to lead to problems.

only it's not my idea. i really thought it was for a moment, but luckily i remember a quote from mother theresa, "the letter of the law killeth," which it turns out is a quote from 2 corinthians. (i find paul loathesome, but i have to hand that one to him. normally i accuse him of being a literalist, based on all the horrible things he says about people that don't join his cult.)

thankfully we live in an age where looking these things up is as easy as ever. there are still only 24 hours in a day though, and with so many things to address, i don't know if there will ever be time to research everything. sure, we ought to try.

yet there will be times when although we've done our best, we simply find ourselves repeating some idea and we don't know where it came from, so we assume it is ours. i feel for george harrison, who wrote some of my favorite songs ever, and was accused of plagiarising the music from a song although he says it was accidental. i don't know if it was, i don't know how i would know, but i think he deserves the benefit of the doubt. if i try to think of a catchy tune, i almost always end up figuring out later that it came from something else. someday we could run out of bars to write, (i'm certainly not the first person to say that.)

in an age where we rethink copyright, i think we should rethink plagiarism. i'm not saying it's okay to just reword something and call it your own, but this is what happens to our thinking over time. if we can remember where we got the idea, sure, credit is good business, just as much as any other form of honesty.

it's not realistic to think, however, that we'll ever be held up to every lie we ever tell, or that some of our "lies" won't be honest omissions, the truth reconstructed from the best of our knowledge. it's also not reasonable to hold up people to every plagiarism.

anyone that actually reads this may feel the desire to look at this sideways, to think funny things about me, but really i just feel overburdened with the idea of accidentally writing something i didn't write. it's easier than people realize, and i'm sure most people don't even think about it. lucky them!

and of course, on the opposite end of coming to any sort of understanding about this as society, we have drm. the thing that will someday tax people for using "the" if we don't kill it right now, but that's another rant, isn't it?

while we're ranting, keith richards, you are the scum of the earth. wipe the self-righteous scowl off your hypocritical f***ing face, you tosser little s***. (long live the verve, 12 bloody notes and the best use of them ever.) i say this even though keith never borrowed a riff in his life, all of his were given to him directly by god...

and for that let's be realistic here, if the bible is the greatest story ever told, it's only because it's the greatest work of plagiarism ever constructed. i prefer honesty when possible, but it's a very popular book no matter how you read it.

so i'm not saying let's give up on the idea of attribution, let's strive to be honest, but the literary world could be a little more fair to themselves. let he who is without sin...

damnit, that phrase has already been used.

damn, that was lengthy

that's what she said!

You afraid of capital letters starting sentences?
Or is your keyboard missing a shift key?

this is the most intelligent response i'm going to get for my post, isn't it? it'll have to do, but i don't have to love it.

No, it's not the most intelligent response but I can give you one.
I am currently in college and taking classes online. One of my classes I just started this term is English Comp and we had to do an essay on plagiarism so I know where you are coming from.
It would be totally impossible to not plagiarise anyone because we tend to repeat things others talk about or write. It's part of our networking and story telling.
But claiming words of others as your very own in writing is wrong. It's a form of stealing and not recognizing the work someone else has put into their writings.
Do we have to quote everyone every time we say something that someone else has said? I don't think so. But if we are writing a story, or writing something we are taking credit for and possibly being paid for, then yes, we should use quotes.
Now if you are repeating something that you have heard years ago and can't remember if it was your idea or someone elses, there's not much you can do about that. That's an honest mistake. And, you can't run around the rest of your life trying to find if someone someplace else has said the same thing you are saying, otherwise you'd spend half your life proving that the words were your own.

thank you.

that's the kind of answer i originally hoped for. and of course, it's much simpler than i put it, which is a feat some manage (that i manage less often.) and it's really appreciated.



yeah, no kidding. and i certainly believe we should be honest about attribution to the best of our knowledge, sometimes even when it just means "i don't remember who said..."

There ya go Amish......see now, we can be buds and discuss and ponder life together. But be forwarned, I do have my cynical, dark snarky side too.

I enjoy a good conversation where we don't beat each other up and try to prove we are right. Just pondering things going on and ideas we aren't sure about.

Hmmm I never thought of it like that, Amish. Certainly there is potential for unintentionally using someone else's words when writing something but considering how many zillions of words and ideas have been written over time, it doesn't seem to me like a fair burden for a writer to carry. Intentionally stealing someone's words, thoughts or ideas, is not the same thing as inadvertently choosing the same words to express your own thoughts. I mean, there are many different ways to express the same thought, but the actual language used to express them is going to remain the same..unless we keep making up new words as we go along.

....let he who is without sin...
I read that somewhere?

Jesus told the people who wanted to stone the adulterous woman "let he who is without sin"... if this was a rhetorical question, my apologies.

me too! and i think you'll find that we meet each other there, snarky for snarky, buds for buds. both of us will go too far sometimes, that's what passionate opinionated people like us do. cheers.

Plagiarism... honesty...

Damn but when I was in university, my group was accused of plagiarism by the professor over a hugeass report we came up with.

Thing is, we were tried and hung before anything was done. There was no way we plagiarised anything because it was to come up with a marketing plan for any product we decided to choose. We picked a new product, the Digital Compact Cassette. And over a few days, we just sat together, with one bloody PC (it was in the days before the Internet was widespread) and hammered out a comprehensive marketing plan from scratch. No references whatsoever except the flyers provided by the company which made the product was necessary because we just went through the whole process following the instructions of the assignment.

The professor decided in her infinite stupidity that we "plagiarised" an assignment from "students from another university".

In our investigations to prove our innocence, we went to find out and discovered that her friend who lectured in the other university, threw a similar product, the Mini-Disc at a whole class and required of them a marketing plan.

Being similar products, we would probably come to the same marketing plan, no matter what as we were being taught classical marketing methods.

So, with that flimsy premise we were accused of plagiarism.

We were livid.

We took this to the Student Legal Department of the Students Union. We wanted to sue the professor, which will basically destroy her credibility and therefore career.

However, pragmatism won over as our group took a vote. I voted to take her to task while the others decided to drop the whole thing if she forgot about the whole thing.

Okay.. the point of this long-ass rant is: how much is plagiarism when there are so many people out there, and if they are talking about similar things, there will be some people who will say the same things. And if I write things which I came up with, and unknown to me, someone else writes the same things, is it plagiarism?

Worse, in this world of instant communication, the Internet with all kinds of information and more being thrown around and with instant access, how can we prove our innocence when accused of plagiarism?

I would think that if my assignment was done today, my group would have no defense whatsoever as everything is available online and instantaneously.

What next then?

douglas adams

I learned about plagarizeing in college but what they really taught us was how to cleverly change the wording around so that is was no longer official plagarism. As scary as that may sound, I think its good teaching. For one, the Bible says that there is nothing new under the sun and that goes for thoughts as well, someone somewhere has already thought every thought you think, and yea someone comes along and takes the credit for it, but their thoughts didn't necesarilly start with them. I'm pretty sure it's alittle more original when it comes to the arts, but the influences, inspirations and knowledge all came from elsewhere.
Secondly, I don't think that we should struggle so hard to take credit for something because that could limit the exposure it gets. Someone once said (sorry whoever it was I can't remember) "If you have knowledge, let others light their candles from it." I think good information should be free to light all of humanity. I understand that people have to get paid, but that's just another way money is the root of all evil, we're willing to withold good information for the sake of money or prideful recognition. Someone also once said, I believe it was Emerson, "The reward for a thing well done is to have done it"
I get stuff stolen from me all the time and I don't get recognition but the fact is, I don't care, as long as that information is reaching somebody and helping somebody, I'll be happy with the fact that I contributed to that.