Plagiarism Is Fine
from the plagiarize-this dept
There’s plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay’s accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard’s plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don’t actually care about plagiarism, only “scalping” Gay. What’s more, their own plagiarism accusations have already started biting them back. And while Gay’s defenders are right that her offenses were comically trivial, because she copied mere banalities, Harvard students are punished severely for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, some of Gay’s defenders probably did the punishing.
A pox on both their houses. Plagiarism is fine, plagiarism rules are stupid, and the plagiarism police should mind their own business.
Everyone “knows” plagiarism is bad, but no one can provide a coherent explanation why. Some people say plagiarism defrauds the reader. Give me a break. Readers don’t care, or if they do, it’s only because they’ve been browbeaten into believing plagiarism is wrong. Others say plagiarism is like stealing. But no one owns ideas, and no one should own the words we use to express them, either.
I’ll be blunt. The plagiarism police are just intellectual landlords, demanding rent in the form of attribution. And plagiarism rules are just a sneaky way for authors to claim de facto ownership of ideas, while cloaking themselves in false virtue. When the plagiarism police cry, “J’accuse!,” we should respond with a raspberry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to attribution. In fact, attribution is great, so long as it’s voluntary, rather than mandatory. Authors should absolutely attribute expressions and ideas, when they think it will help readers, or even just to honor an author they admire. But authors shouldn’t be required to attribute, unless they think it’s deserved. Let us cite out of love, rather than obligation.
Some people worry that eliminating plagiarism rules will harm disadvantaged authors, who often don’t get the credit they deserve. I doubt it. For one thing, plagiarism rules have existed for at least 2000 years. If they were going to protect disadvantaged authors, they would have done it by now. For another, plagiarism rules actually create a “Matthew Effect,” in which the most prominent authors get all the credit, and the disadvantaged authors get ignored. Why not adopt attribution norms that encourage citation of deserving disadvantaged authors instead of undeserving privileged ones?
You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. And I can prove it. I’ve published scholarly articles arguing that plagiarism rules are unjustified, authorizing plagiarism of myself, providing a “plagiarism license,” advocating a “right of reattribution,” offering to reattribute my own articles (please claim one!), using essay mills, plagiarizing every word (I stole the idea from Jonathan Lethem), proposing to teach law students how to plagiarize efficiently (in the practice of law, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice), and using AI to reflect on the legitimacy of plagiarism norms. I’m dead serious. Well, as serious as I get, anyway.
Think about it. We want to believe plagiarism rules protect original expressions and ideas. But AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities. Why treat them like spun gold, rather than the chaff they really are?
We’ve now spent weeks debating how to interpret and apply plagiarism rules. If anything comes out of this idiotic “scandal,” I hope it’s that, when it comes to plagiarism norms, the juice definitely isn’t worth the squeeze. We should just admit they’re a waste of time and abandon them. We should stop punishing authors for “stealing” clichés, And we should especially stop punishing students “for their own good.” Plagiarism is also a way of learning, so we should encourage it, whenever it helps students learn more effectively and efficiently.
By the way, every word of this op-ed is plagiarized. Or maybe it isn’t. I’m not telling, because it doesn’t matter.
Filed Under: academia, academics, attribution, claudine gay, ideas, plagiarism
Comments on “Plagiarism Is Fine”
* plague
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Depends in part upon the disease you are wishing upon them.
Shakespeare used both pox and plague at different times, although Mercutio’s line may have been plague.
Re: Borges & Pierre Menard
I think you would appreciate the short story by Borges, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote
Basically, Pierre Menard rewrites Don Quixote de La Mancha, word by word identical to the original, but better, because Pierre thinks more deeply about every single word he writes…
The irony of plagiarism is that taking credit for other people’s work is frowned upon in higher education, but in the workplace it can get you promotions and is seen as a normal course of action for managers. Even if a manger is useless or an impediment to progress, they can still claim they were “in charge” when the project succeeded.
Re: Tyranny of the organization chart
Managers taking the glory for their subordinates’ work is a consequence of the “tyranny of the organization chart.”
Aaron Renn explained the tyranny on his old Urbanophile blog. He saw it firsthand when he was a consultant for one of the big accounting firms.
In any workplace, as a worker, you are the function you occupy on the organization chart. A talented subordinate who comes up with a great idea might be seen as a promising candidate for promotion, and they could pose as competition for the manager. So the manager gets or takes credit for the subordinates’ idea. Executives understand this dynamic at the worker-manager level, and develop a skepticism (if not outright distrust) of their managers’ abilities.
They hire outside consultants to gather “intelligence” from workers and managers, and the better ideas get filtered by the consultant and presented to executives, who get ultimate credit for an idea should it succeed.
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“…the better ideas get filtered by the consultant and presented to executives, who get ultimate credit for an idea should it succeed.”
With the consultant taking the fall if it doesn’t. You forgot that part.
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I guess you haven’t met many dissertation advisors. Some will take credit for their advisees’ work, even the economic profits from it. I have seen it happen to colleagues; I have experienced it.
Never underestimate the allure of power moves in Academia.
Mike, they have infected you subconsciously. You say “no one owns ideas” and yet you use the language of theft saying you “stole” an idea from someone else. We need to stop treating ideas as property if we want to improve the culture in this area.
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Read the byline.
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Apologies, Brian. My RSS reader attributed the column to Mike and I didn’t look closely on the web version. My guess is you don’t care, though.
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Misattribution is not the same thing as the lack of attribution required for a charge of plagiarism.
Second
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Hah!! Love it! Great to see TechDirt arguing that Gray is the victim and she was “scalped” on top!! LOVE IT! 🤡🤡
What a terrible take
So, by this reasoning, no one ever has to even acknowledge the work that went into a thing, they can just copy it and proclaim it their own work. Maybe you’re fine with that, Brian, but I don’t want to live in a world where content farms find something good and then copy/paste it dozens of times into their own networks for profit.
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So the existing rules/laws against plagiarism are already not working, that’s what you’re saying?
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There is no law against plagiarizing itself, in most cases. There are only norms. Legally, the only protections are things like copyright.
That said, the correct take is that they do work, but they are imperfect. As with literally any rule/law. Just because some people still drive drunk does not mean DUI laws aren’t working.
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Turns out it’s easy to insulate a terrible take from criticism by declaring that everyone who disagrees is brainwashed—oh, sorry, “browbeaten”.
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Yeah, this is a horrible take. Plagiarism rules being cumbersome in academia does not mean that plagiarism as a concept is good, and the claim that “AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities” is nonsense. Taken to its logical conclusion, it suggests that no more creative writing should ever be valued or take place ever again, as nothing other than “generic banalities” will ever be produced, clearly nonsensical.
If Brian Frye’s parents are not using contraceptives yet I would suggest this article is good evidence they do so.
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That last line goes too far.
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Direct copying is still a copyright violation. Plagiarism is generally not illegal; it’s an academic violation.
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“Direct copying is still a copyright violation.”
So if I directly copy a 19th century-published version of Romeo and Juliet, whose copyright am I violating?
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Yeah, this is a horrible take. Plagiarism rules being cumbersome in academia does not mean that plagiarism as a concept is good, and the claim that “AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities” is nonsense. Taken to its logical conclusion, it suggests that no more creative writing should ever be valued or take place ever again, as nothing other than “generic banalities” will ever be produced, clearly nonsensical.
By the way, every word of this op-ed is plagiarized.
“I” “can” “confirm”. “I” “have” “seen” “every” “one” “of” “those” “words” “in” “other” “works”.
Footnote: it is up to the reader to determine which works each of the quoted parts in my comment. (this footnote might also be from another work but I couldn’t bother to check.)
Rules about plagiarism in higher education are definitely quite ridiculous. I’ve had to paraphrase definitions and results of studies in my undergrad thesis, because literature reviews weren’t allowed to quote too much existing text according to university rules.
All it did was waste time and introduce the chance for inadvertent errors. I can understand requiring some citations when its important to have context, but plagiarism rules often go too far
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“…because literature reviews weren’t allowed to quote too much existing text according to university rules.”
On the basis of copyright law, not plagiarism rules. If it has value in a newly published study, then it’s current and therefore likely new enough to still be under copyright.
For one thing, representative democracy has existed for at least 2000 years. But we still have disadvantaged people. Clearly, we should discard the concept of democratic society as irrelevant, if not counterproductive.
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I mean yeah, of course?
I normally agree with these articles, but this time I’m half-and-half. Yes, there is a lot of nuance when it comes to deciphering which is plagiarized and which isn’t. Especially when you look at the history of writing and realize that it’s an ouroboros of works cannibalizing works. If the information is used for an argument and is properly quoted and sourced, then that is not plagiarism anymore, it’s now transformative. I do think that there should be some level of leeway given to people using academic resources imperfectly. Sourcing and citing is always the hardest and the easiest to screw up.
With that said though, plagiarism shouldn’t be excused entirely. Academic papers are one thing, but when essays are used for profit (like video essays on YouTube) and you improperly source work or none at all, then that plagiarism should be scrutinized. The last thing we need is more bad-faith thieves like James Somberton to be allowed free range.
This has the same vibes as the people that say “musicians who want to get paid for their music are sellouts” because they don’t want to pay for music.
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Musicians who believe they’re entitled to pay for their music are sellouts.
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And people that think they’re entitled to music for free are idiots.
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Not really. I can get all the music I want for free and it doesn’t cost anyone anything.
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Yeah, just like the farmers who think they’re entitled to money just for growing your food are sellouts….
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They would be if they tried to stop me from growing identical food.
This take is so moronic that no one will even want to plagiarise it.
What a bad take.
As someone who was in academia, I regularly used citations to follow something back to an original paper, which gave more information on something I was looking at. No one browbeat me into that. It was extremely useful.
And this idea is regularly explained to first year students. If you think no one can provide it, you aren’t looking.
There are literally over a dozen citations of very obscure papers in my dissertation, that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. They were good papers, too. And they didn’t pop up in other resources like Google Scholar. It worked.
(Not to mention, plenty of examples of papers becoming famous/useful decades after being first written, or rediscovered)
Having to cite things doesn’t stop you from using them.
Quite the opposite- plagiarizing them is effectively trying to claim the benefits of owning the idea. You lose nothing by citing it, other than presumptive ownership for having originated it.
Except there’s plenty of lazy authors out there. They can get bent. Cite it properly.
That’s nonsense There’s nothing you can learn from plagiarizing that you couldn’t learn from citing.
That literally already exists, and would be made worse by your proposed standard.
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Cosigned!
Plenty of academic papers are run-of-the-mill, filling in a tiny piece of a stupendously big puzzle. But if you’re the one who fills in that piece, you deserve credit for doing it. An “eh, I don’t wanna” policy for citations would make following the history of ideas impossible.
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Such a shame that I can flag this as insightful only once.
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So you agree. Anti-plagiarist writers covet ownership in ideas, which does not exist.
Repeating something true isn’t the same thing as joining the crusade to stop other people from repeating it, too.
It's rare that I think this at TD...
… but this is an incredibly stupid article. I hope for your sake that it is entirely plagiarized, because if this is your own original work, then whatever institutions of higher learning you may have attended have utterly failed you.
For awhile there I though I was reading The Onion.
“Readers don’t care, or if they do, it’s only because they’ve been browbeaten into believing plagiarism is wrong.”
This is just not true. And not just because it’s a blanket statement. Some readers certainly don’t care. Plenty of readers do. But readers caring or not is orthogonal to the notion of plagiarism. Basically a straw man argument.
“Others say plagiarism is like stealing. But no one owns ideas, and no one should own the words we use to express them, either.”
Plagiarism isn’t about ideas. It’s about copying how ideas have been fixed without attribution. Lots of people have similar ideas. How people express them takes effort. It is work. Copying others’ work isn’t “like” stealing. It is stealing.
It is utterly shameful that anyone would condone or justify theft.
I find the assertion that citation requirements are responsible for the Matthew effect to be, well, a bit baffling. Why wouldn’t the same rich-get-richer dynamic happen under a more lax standard? If students are taught to “cite out of love, rather than obligation”, then they’ll point to the works they love, which they learned about by other people pointing to the works they love, and round and round we go. If it’s OK to copy text wholesale, you’ll just get people copying the same few references. A phenomenon that stems from people being lazy can’t be fixed by a policy of laziness.
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I agree that the ‘attribute however you like’ standard would make the Matthew effect worse. For example, it’s pretty typical in the think-tank world for junior researchers to write something (a blog post, a press-release quote etc.), but for this to be attributed to someone more senior (the head of research, the CEO etc.).
The justification for this is that the quote (or whatever) will be taken more seriously if it comes from this ‘known name’. This is a clear example of how a lax attribution standard exacerbates the Matthew effect. It will always make more sense from a ‘sales’ perspective for an idea to be attributed to a known name.
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Such a shame that I can flag this as insightful only once.
I believe that I can concisely explain why plagiarism feels wrong: it’s dishonest.
Sure, people don’t own ideas, but that’s not why plagiarism feels wrong. The crux of the issue is that plagiarists knowingly steal credit from other people. It’s why James Somerton is going down in infamy – he didn’t steal ideas, but he found other people’s research and, very importantly, passed it off as his own original research. That’s the core of why plagiarism is harshly condemned – using ideas that others came up with (which isn’t a problem in itself) but pretending that you came up with all of it yourself. It’s dishonest.
(Please do not construe this as needing to cite sources for everything. There is a huge difference between paraphrasing or summarizing well-known fact(s) and copying vast amounts of someone else’s research while passing it all off as research that you yourself personally did.)
No, plagiarism is a real problem
I have to disagree with almost all of this.
There’s 2 normal justifications for opposing plagiarism.
The first is that, on a school assignment, making the assignment better by copying someone else prevents the student from getting the experience and presents a false picture of their abilities. It’s true that in real life, copying stuff is fine, but it’s also true that you should hire an expert to check stuff you aren’t sure of, and I’m not allowed to do that on my final exam either.
The second is that, in actual work, like a review article or essay, not citing sources harms both the source and the reader. The source of some information might be denied credit for valuable work, giving the impression that the author of the paper using their work came up with some claim or data independently. The reader is denied the ability to follow the claim to its source and check it themself. With the system working properly, if a reader is wondering where the study is that supports something, or what historical document said something, they can go check its methods or reliability for themself. If the only paper making a certain claim is retracted, it’s possible to go through every later paper repeating it and see they all got it from the same bad paper, rather than just let that claim be treated as true when made elsewhere forever. If a paper mentions in passing the answer to your real question, you can find the study that covered it fully. If they really like a quote, they can find to writer and read their work. Etc. It’s the same reason this site links to other articles making a claim so frequently. If it says “convicted cow thief Kevin McCarthy” and I’m wondering when and why he stole a cow, I can follow the link and see.
Notably, the second issue is much more concerned with claims than exact wording. Making a claim without citation is bad, because it’s unsourced and the reader can’t follow up. It doesn’t matter if the words are copied or paraphrased. Indeed, copying wording can prevent inaccuracies and games of telephone, and act like a weak citation by making it easier to search for a source.
The issue is when people try to apply the rules of the first situation, a school assignment (or even worse, the rules of copyright law), to the second context. It’s absurd to say that quoting large sections in a review article, legal brief, essay on history, etc. is somehow “getting out of work” or “cheating”. The point isn’t to practice a skill or demonstrate competence, it’s to produce a good product. But saying “some scientists also found the compound we’re discussing might prevent cancer” with no link or citation isn’t good, since the reader can’t check, and “this might prevent cancer” is worse, since the reader might think that implies you did the work yourself.
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The root problem, I think, is that we want to use school as some kind of indicator of skill and experience, and we have little clue how to do it. Having to do everything oneself is a “skill” one will have to un-learn to be effective in a real workplace; the whole point of a company is to have people working together. I suppose squabbling about credit is somewhat reflective of workplace reality, even if not at all useful to employers. Degrees don’t mean much, job interviews don’t mean much, references from strangers don’t mean much… but for some reason we’re determined to keep up the pretense.
Certainly citations can be useful, but where’s all the outrage at the major media outlets constantly omitting it? They seem almost allergic to linking to the papers they write about, even when they’re freely available government documents. If plagiarism is not “fine”, it might be the wrong focus, anyway. Has anyone checked whether Gay’s paper was actually any good, for example? Did it give society useful information, in a way they could understand and verify?
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Places like the NYT actually get a massive amount of criticism from other journalists for not properly attributing things, and passing off stories as if they’re the first ones reporting on it.
It’s a huge problem, places like the NYT are just big enough they don’t have to care.
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I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing. I often see stuff like “[person] said something in a tweet” without linking or quoting the tweet, or “a researcher at [some university] has discovered…” without a link to the paper. Technically, it’s attributed to someone, but not in a very useful way.
Why should we care who reported something first? That just seems bizarre. The very early news stories are usually crap anyway, just a lot of “more on this when we find out what happened”.
Re: Re: Re:2
There’s news and there’s news. If we’re talking about a plane crash or similar, then sure. It’s big enough and verifiable enough that it doesn’t matter. But take for instance the “news” that Sweden were taking children from muslim parents.
What was this based on? What were their sources?
Being able to follow the path a story has taken can be very important to figure out the trustworthiness of the story and for what purpose it was written. It’s a question of being able to find the person who has done the research himself and/or talked to the persons the story is about.
Interesting article. Here are my thoughts:
There’s plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay’s accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard’s plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don’t actually care about plagiarism, only “scalping” Gay. What’s more, their own plagiarism accusations have already started biting them back. And while Gay’s defenders are right that her offenses were comically trivial, because she copied mere banalities, Harvard students are punished severely for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, some of Gay’s defenders probably did the punishing.
A pox on both their houses. Plagiarism is fine, plagiarism rules are stupid, and the plagiarism police should mind their own business.
Everyone “knows” plagiarism is bad, but no one can provide a coherent explanation why. Some people say plagiarism defrauds the reader. Give me a break. Readers don’t care, or if they do, it’s only because they’ve been browbeaten into believing plagiarism is wrong. Others say plagiarism is like stealing. But no one owns ideas, and no one should own the words we use to express them, either.
I’ll be blunt. The plagiarism police are just intellectual landlords, demanding rent in the form of attribution. And plagiarism rules are just a sneaky way for authors to claim de facto ownership of ideas, while cloaking themselves in false virtue. When the plagiarism police cry, “J’accuse!,” we should respond with a raspberry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to attribution. In fact, attribution is great, so long as it’s voluntary, rather than mandatory. Authors should absolutely attribute expressions and ideas, when they think it will help readers, or even just to honor an author they admire. But authors shouldn’t be required to attribute, unless they think it’s deserved. Let us cite out of love, rather than obligation.
Some people worry that eliminating plagiarism rules will harm disadvantaged authors, who often don’t get the credit they deserve. I doubt it. For one thing, plagiarism rules have existed for at least 2000 years. If they were going to protect disadvantaged authors, they would have done it by now. For another, plagiarism rules actually create a “Matthew Effect,” in which the most prominent authors get all the credit, and the disadvantaged authors get ignored. Why not adopt attribution norms that encourage citation of deserving disadvantaged authors instead of undeserving privileged ones?
You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. And I can prove it. I’ve published scholarly articles arguing that plagiarism rules are unjustified, authorizing plagiarism of myself, providing a “plagiarism license,” advocating a “right of reattribution,” offering to reattribute my own articles (please claim one!), using essay mills, plagiarizing every word (I stole the idea from Jonathan Lethem), proposing to teach law students how to plagiarize efficiently (in the practice of law, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice), and using AI to reflect on the legitimacy of plagiarism norms. I’m dead serious. Well, as serious as I get, anyway.
Think about it. We want to believe plagiarism rules protect original expressions and ideas. But AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities. Why treat them like spun gold, rather than the chaff they really are?
We’ve now spent weeks debating how to interpret and apply plagiarism rules. If anything comes out of this idiotic “scandal,” I hope it’s that, when it comes to plagiarism norms, the juice definitely isn’t worth the squeeze. We should just admit they’re a waste of time and abandon them. We should stop punishing authors for “stealing” clichés, And we should especially stop punishing students “for their own good.” Plagiarism is also a way of learning, so we should encourage it, whenever it helps students learn more effectively and efficiently.
By the way, every word of this op-ed is plagiarized. Or maybe it isn’t. I’m not telling, because it doesn’t matter.
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Hmm…
James Somerton received many thousands of dollars from viewers who thought that giving him money would enable him to produce more of the ideas they enjoyed listening to. If they had known that James Somerton’s ideas were just copied from other articles, then they would have understood that giving him their money would not, in fact, lead to more of those ideas existing.
The same is true in academia, where better researchers can win more grant funding. Taking credit for other people’s ideas is a fraud against the reader, often in the literal sense of taking money by deception.
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(Same anonymous coward.)
Then how about students plagiarising their coursework? As much as I’d like to believe that students learn by plagiarising, that’s wishful thinking, and demonstrably untrue. I’ve had plenty of my own students try to cheat on assessments by copying from each other or from the internet. We brought them in to ask them questions about the work they submitted, and they couldn’t adequately explain any of it.
Not just “oh, it was two weeks ago, I’ve forgotten what I wrote”. They were hopeless, often unable to explain basic concepts or answer questions much easier than the coursework. If plagiarising had led them to learn anything about the subject, there was no evidence of it.
If those students’ coursework were marked as if they had not plagiarised, then I’d have been endorsing them as having knowledge and skills which they definitely did not have. A passing mark in a course is supposed to mean that the student achieved the learning objectives for that course, not that they knew how to copy and paste.
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Firstly, the fact that you consider you job is to ‘assess’ students and not ‘teach’ students is the crux of the problem. If the learning objectives aren’t met neither are the teaching objectives
Secondly, what is your course material other than something you’re giving students a license to plagiarise?
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Assessment is part of teaching. There’s no way around that; the fact that it is often done in silly ways just means that we need to improve how we do it, not that we need to stop doing it.
And no, that’s not the purpose of course material. It’s to be learned from.
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In software development, at least, copying shit from the internet is an important part of how it’s done in the real world. An employer will be annoyed if someone wastes time by re-writing code that’s already publically available, or tries to do it alone instead of getting help from co-workers when stuck.
Of course, people really should learn the stuff, and it’d be useful if employers could assume that a particular degree indicated they had and that they’d be a good person to hire. But in my experience hiring people, I’ve never found that to be the case, and I doubt it ever really was.
It’s not just computer stuff either. Look at any newspaper, for example, and you’ll find reporters who don’t know what basics terms such as “everyday” or “more than” mean (and, evidently, nobody copy-edits stories anymore). I doubt that’s the fault of plagiarism.
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Ah, yes, software development, that smoothly functional process which all areas of society should strive to emulate.
(Seriously, just take two seconds and paste in a comment with the URL of whatever StackExchange thread you found the code snippet in. Credit given where credit due, and you’ll thank yourself six months later when you are trying to figure out why you did it that way and are struggling to find the right StackExchange thread out of all the ones that sound just like it.)
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Well, it might be nice if software were written by real engineers, rather than people who get away with calling themselves “engineers”… and, sure, it’s kind of important for various reasons to say where code came from (and might therefore be better to use the code as a real library rather than copying-and-pasting, but that’s beside the point). But I think that’s more about maintainability than credit, which means that framing it as “plagiarism” is again missing the point.
Similarly, copying is normal in all kinds of fields. Architecture, construction, clothing design, etc. Sometimes it makes sense to credit someone, especially if one’s outright copying parts of blueprints; but other times ideas are just “in the air” and credit would mean research to find out where it came from—and that’s really not useful.
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Unlike physical products, software has two problems, being mathematics in its own right, proof of correctness runs into the completeness problem, there is no guarantee that a proof can be found, and certainly no guarantee that a proof can be found in reasonable time. It also has the problem there is no way of testing software as a single product, you can only test individual functions, and full coverage is a LOT of tests.
That is to say, if I want to find out what force a beam can withstand there is a calculation that will give me the answer. If I want to find out if a car will stand up to everyday use there are test tracks will subject the car to condition that are a bit beyond normal driving conditions. There are also test facilities to allow it to be baked and frozen to test that it stays working.
That said, even with professional engineering, things occasionally go wrong, witness all product recalls.
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We don’t really need a guarantee. A designer could probably also design a building that engineers couldn’t practically prove. When that happens, it’ll need to be re-designed.
You can look at seL4 to see what that looks like for software. There are still a few assumptions and limitations of their proofs, but nothing crazy; they’ve done much better than most software. eBPF in Linux is another example: the whole virtual machine is designed to limit unprovable cases, and if something unprovable crops up, it’s rejected. It turns out to be pretty useful anyway.
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“Well, it might be nice if software were written by real engineers, rather than people who get away with calling themselves “engineers”…”
To be honest, I’m not sure that I would want a website to be built by someone who knows how to build a bridge, but is completely fucking clueless about how the Internet works.
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Attribution is the one requirement imposed by the BSD license, and back in the days when BSD split from AT&T and they fought in the courts, the license requirement that AT&T was found to have breached. That fight held up BSD enough that Linux had the advantage in becoming the Unix like system of choice.
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That’s not how I recall things, and Wikipedia doesn’t support any of it being true. See USL v. BSDi. BSD was under a proprietary license, which limited who was allowed to even look at it. Berkeley students removed that code and replaced it with new code under “the BSD license” (actually a class of licenses, then having the notable requirement “All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by…”). That’s why the copyright notices showed the University rather than AT&T or USL.
I don’t see any indication either party was “found” by a court to have breached anything. When the court appeared sceptical of the claims, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement.
Anyway, there’s a tiny group of people pushing back against even attribution requirements by publishing software under the “0BSD” license or various other forms of near-public-domain licenses, or as actual public domain.
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It is not a matter of me “considering” it part of my job, it’s literally part of my job description. Obviously alongside teaching. Perhaps you’re aware that some jobs involve more than one responsibility.
If my students’ learning isn’t assessed, how are they supposed to be awarded qualifications saying what they learned? Should qualifications be awarded unconditionally? Who would want a certificate that only said they showed up?
The objective of teaching is to show the student the door, the learning objective is for them to walk through it. Obviously one can be met without the other.
The last part, about students having a license to plagiarise from course materials, is so far from anything someone might reasonably believe that I really am at a loss. I am unable to diagnose your misconception here.
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Yes, it was face-palmingly stupid not to consider the implications there (and that’s being generous – the worse alternative is that he did consider them and thought it was fine). No wonder Brian Frye doesn’t want to unequivocally take credit for this piece.
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He did consider it:
That’s the part I was responding to. The author claims that it’s fine for students to plagiarise, because it’s better for their learning if they plagiarise. Merely saying “citation needed” doesn’t do that justice.
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Also, copy/pasting just requires thoughtlessly clicking and dragging the icon. Providing a citation requires actually engaging with the material, if only to know whose work you’re citing.
Sorry for the long post, guys, but I’ll hope you’ll bear with me…
There’s plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay’s accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard’s plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don’t actually care about plagiarism, only “scalping” Gay. What’s more, their own plagiarism accusations have already started biting them back. And while Gay’s defenders are right that her offenses were comically trivial, because she copied mere banalities, Harvard students are punished severely for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, some of Gay’s defenders probably did the punishing.
A pox on both their houses. Plagiarism is fine, plagiarism rules are stupid, and the plagiarism police should mind their own business.
Everyone “knows” plagiarism is bad, but no one can provide a coherent explanation why. Some people say plagiarism defrauds the reader. Give me a break. Readers don’t care, or if they do, it’s only because they’ve been browbeaten into believing plagiarism is wrong. Others say plagiarism is like stealing. But no one owns ideas, and no one should own the words we use to express them, either.
I’ll be blunt. The plagiarism police are just intellectual landlords, demanding rent in the form of attribution. And plagiarism rules are just a sneaky way for authors to claim de facto ownership of ideas, while cloaking themselves in false virtue. When the plagiarism police cry, “J’accuse!,” we should respond with a raspberry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to attribution. In fact, attribution is great, so long as it’s voluntary, rather than mandatory. Authors should absolutely attribute expressions and ideas, when they think it will help readers, or even just to honor an author they admire. But authors shouldn’t be required to attribute, unless they think it’s deserved. Let us cite out of love, rather than obligation.
Some people worry that eliminating plagiarism rules will harm disadvantaged authors, who often don’t get the credit they deserve. I doubt it. For one thing, plagiarism rules have existed for at least 2000 years. If they were going to protect disadvantaged authors, they would have done it by now. For another, plagiarism rules actually create a “Matthew Effect,” in which the most prominent authors get all the credit, and the disadvantaged authors get ignored. Why not adopt attribution norms that encourage citation of deserving disadvantaged authors instead of undeserving privileged ones?
You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. And I can prove it. I’ve published scholarly articles arguing that plagiarism rules are unjustified, authorizing plagiarism of myself, providing a “plagiarism license,” advocating a “right of reattribution,” offering to reattribute my own articles (please claim one!), using essay mills, plagiarizing every word (I stole the idea from Jonathan Lethem), proposing to teach law students how to plagiarize efficiently (in the practice of law, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice), and using AI to reflect on the legitimacy of plagiarism norms. I’m dead serious. Well, as serious as I get, anyway.
Think about it. We want to believe plagiarism rules protect original expressions and ideas. But AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities. Why treat them like spun gold, rather than the chaff they really are?
We’ve now spent weeks debating how to interpret and apply plagiarism rules. If anything comes out of this idiotic “scandal,” I hope it’s that, when it comes to plagiarism norms, the juice definitely isn’t worth the squeeze. We should just admit they’re a waste of time and abandon them. We should stop punishing authors for “stealing” clichés, And we should especially stop punishing students “for their own good.” Plagiarism is also a way of learning, so we should encourage it, whenever it helps students learn more effectively and efficiently.
By the way, every word of this op-ed is plagiarized. Or maybe it isn’t. I’m not telling, because it doesn’t matter.
Re:
I disagree.
There’s plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay’s accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard’s plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don’t actually care about plagiarism, only “scalping” Gay. What’s more, their own plagiarism accusations have already started biting them back. And while Gay’s defenders are right that her offenses were comically trivial, because she copied mere banalities, Harvard students are punished severely for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, some of Gay’s defenders probably did the punishing.
A pox on both their houses. Plagiarism is fine, plagiarism rules are stupid, and the plagiarism police should mind their own business.
Everyone “knows” plagiarism is bad, but no one can provide a coherent explanation why. Some people say plagiarism defrauds the reader. Give me a break. Readers don’t care, or if they do, it’s only because they’ve been browbeaten into believing plagiarism is wrong. Others say plagiarism is like stealing. But no one owns ideas, and no one should own the words we use to express them, either.
I’ll be blunt. The plagiarism police are just intellectual landlords, demanding rent in the form of attribution. And plagiarism rules are just a sneaky way for authors to claim de facto ownership of ideas, while cloaking themselves in false virtue. When the plagiarism police cry, “J’accuse!,” we should respond with a raspberry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to attribution. In fact, attribution is great, so long as it’s voluntary, rather than mandatory. Authors should absolutely attribute expressions and ideas, when they think it will help readers, or even just to honor an author they admire. But authors shouldn’t be required to attribute, unless they think it’s deserved. Let us cite out of love, rather than obligation.
Some people worry that eliminating plagiarism rules will harm disadvantaged authors, who often don’t get the credit they deserve. I doubt it. For one thing, plagiarism rules have existed for at least 2000 years. If they were going to protect disadvantaged authors, they would have done it by now. For another, plagiarism rules actually create a “Matthew Effect,” in which the most prominent authors get all the credit, and the disadvantaged authors get ignored. Why not adopt attribution norms that encourage citation of deserving disadvantaged authors instead of undeserving privileged ones?
You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. And I can prove it. I’ve published scholarly articles arguing that plagiarism rules are unjustified, authorizing plagiarism of myself, providing a “plagiarism license,” advocating a “right of reattribution,” offering to reattribute my own articles (please claim one!), using essay mills, plagiarizing every word (I stole the idea from Jonathan Lethem), proposing to teach law students how to plagiarize efficiently (in the practice of law, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice), and using AI to reflect on the legitimacy of plagiarism norms. I’m dead serious. Well, as serious as I get, anyway.
Think about it. We want to believe plagiarism rules protect original expressions and ideas. But AI shows us that most of what we produce is generic banalities. Why treat them like spun gold, rather than the chaff they really are?
We’ve now spent weeks debating how to interpret and apply plagiarism rules. If anything comes out of this idiotic “scandal,” I hope it’s that, when it comes to plagiarism norms, the juice definitely isn’t worth the squeeze. We should just admit they’re a waste of time and abandon them. We should stop punishing authors for “stealing” clichés, And we should especially stop punishing students “for their own good.” Plagiarism is also a way of learning, so we should encourage it, whenever it helps students learn more effectively and efficiently.
By the way, every word of this op-ed is plagiarized. Or maybe it isn’t. I’m not telling, because it doesn’t matter.
Bad education
Plagiarism is a symptom of the corruption of educational institutions where the focus is to test rather than educate.
You can see this if you consider that plagiarism and other forms of “cheating” invalidates testing processes but significantly aids the learning process.
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I have taught a lot of students, and caught plenty of the plagiarising. I have never seen a student whose learning was significantly aided by not citing a source. The idea is patently absurd.
So what’s the difference between plagiarism and GPT-generated content? Because current AI models can’t attribute, but they’re definitely using other works as source material.
And if there’s a difference: easy solution: run any content through a GPT filter to get a washed version.
But it seems to me that, especially in academic circles, the real aim is to get a chain of provenance that allows academics to get funding and recognition based on who’s quoting whom. And they enforce that strictly on undergrads as a way of training them to do things correctly.
And then, of course, there’s copyright. What people write is owned by them for the duration of copyright, so lifting it and presenting it as your own is technically a copyright violation if you’re a copyright maximalist. And the maximalists have spent decades spinning a false narrative that words want to be owned and you owe someone else any time you happen to duplicate their string of words.
plagiarizing every word...
Did you add “(I stole the idea from Jonathan Lethem)” because you didn’t want to be accused of plagiarism?
I agree wholeheartedly but never expected to see this position argued on TD! Very radical! And obviously correct!
Plagiarism involves lying–presenting someone else’s work or words as your own [ideas, concepts, theories, whatever]. There… simple.
Reposting this everywhere
BRB I’m going to repost the exact text of this pretty much everywhere without attribution.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Defining Deviance Down
As always, rather than holding members of favored victim groups to the same standards required of everyone, when a member of that group is found to be violating those standards, the woke response is to discard the standards rather than punish the behavior. It doesn’t matter whether it’s plagiarism by a Harvard president or looting at the local CVS.
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“As always, rather than holding members of favored victim groups to the same standards required of everyone, when a member of that group is found to be violating those standards, the woke response is to discard the standards rather than punish the behavior.”
Your ‘chosen one’ is going to prison. The SCOTUS is throwing the Donald under the bus. The GOP will replace him with another victim of the wokeness .. whatever that means. GOP has the best projection, no one projects better than GOP does.
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Fuck off, Trump. *re-reads* Oh, sorry. Thought you were someone else there…
Academic house rules
She’s an academic. She knows the rules. The fact that no one dug this out previously is kind of amazing. Citations are important in academia because the game is all about showing your work so that others can evaluate, replicate, and build one’s publications. Paraphrasing is one thing, but dropping another’s text in without attribution undermines the model. She just had to drop in citations – this isn’t rocket science.
BTW, right now, people are working feverishly to check up on their hated deans and dept heads at universities around the world.
[citation needed]
“Plagiarism is also a way of learning”
I thought the most effective way of learning it is by doing it. In that regard, plagiarism is the complete opposite of what you claim – that is “a way of avoiding learning”.
I am, of course, not talking about borrowing phrases, but about copying essays, articles, …
It’s one thing to argue that “everything is a remix”, something I agree with.
It’s another to claim that stealing the credit for someone else’s work is a remix.
It’s also one thing to say some of the rules are silly, and another to use that to argue that the rules have to be abolished.
I still can’t believe that Techdirt has an article arguing, if implicitly, for widening the class divide in higher education.
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“I still can’t believe that Techdirt has an article arguing, if implicitly, for widening the class divide in higher education.”
Which class division in higher education is being implicitly argued for widening by Techdirt?
How is this class defined? How is it widened? How is TD arguing for .. what?
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It’s more of an implied argument.
If you let plagiarism run rampant, only the rich can afford to, ahem, “copy their homework”.
And since plagiarism would be legal, it leads to a further class divide where only the rich will graduate.
It’s not a very explicit argument, and a lot of the article is so stupid the class divide argument needs not to be mentioned.
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Agreed. The essay mills that Frye brings up are one example where the haves can possess an advantage over the have-nots.
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“And since plagiarism would be legal…”
There is no law against plagiarism that I know of, so it is legal. Universities, etc., don’t like it, however, which is why it’s against there rules.
Impressive
I’m impressed by how deeply stupid this article is.
If you think no one can explain why plagiarism is bad, t’s because you’re not listening.
Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of academia because it directly undercuts the guiding ethos of scholarship. Scholarship at its best is an honest conversation among scholars aiming to advance knowledge. To have that conversation, you have to invoke the ideas of the scholars you’re responding to and building on. To have a conversation that advances knowledge, the conversants have to trust that everyone is being honest and has done the work. Taking words and ideas from other scholars without citing them undercuts both of those goals. If a scholar fails to cite their sources, they’re breaking the line of conversation. If a scholar plagiarizes something, what new thing are they bringing to the conversation? If a scholar plagiarizes something, how do we know that they haven’t been dishonest in other ways? Plagiarism breaks the scholarly chain and destroys the quest for knowledge in that line.
It’s malpractice with all the implications of that word.
Re: Impressive
I’m also impressed by the implied hypocrisy of “I stole this idea from Jonathan Lethem.” No, you didn’t. You used it, and cited him for it. Good scholarship all around.
A good video follow up
I agree. I’ve also watched this rather excellent and funny YouTube video on the matter from HBomberGuy and I think he agrees too: plagiarism is not theft, but it’s indeed wrong when some people are exploiting the work of others without proper attribution and/or recognition, especially when it’s blatant copy of a good percentage of the initial work, or simply disguised as original work. I think the importance of plagiarism also depends of who is plagiarised, and how. If I plagiarised Victor Hugo, I’ll look like an idiot, if I plagiarised an obscure academic study, good for me if I don’t get caught (nobody cares), but it’s bad if my work somehow cast a shadow on the plagiarised “victim”: Hugo or the study wouldn’t suffer, but if I plagiarised someone doing the same thing as me, then it can be bad.
Too much of a good thing?
“Plagiarism” is matter of context, and a matter of degree.
Others have already mentioned that often, in the context of real world employments, “plagiarism” is standard practice or even obligatory.
But degree and intent also matter. Because seriously, even when plagiarism is undesirable, screaming “Plagiarism!” because somebody incorporated a half-sentence that was nicely expressed, in the course of a larger, and original, work, tends to confuse the tree for the forest — and conflicts with the actual purpose and with common sense. (For example, somebody else in the comments raised the practical example from real-world experience, of rules to prevent plagiarism being applied to even using definitions in a paper.)
Proscriptions against plagiarism are supposed to be guidance on ethical behavior, not some Procrustean framework that places strict, absolutist observance of “The Rules” above all other considerations.
Re: Come on
“because somebody incorporated a half-sentence that was nicely expressed”
Just use f***** quote marks! What the heck is so difficult about that?
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Well, you have to press the shift button at the same time as pressing ‘2’ on the number line near the top of the keyboard, and not everyone is good at multi-tasking.
Looks like this article is trying to confuse the issues instead of trying to provide useful information, and thus trolling is not required for this and we can simply dismiss the claims.
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From a terop comment on a previous article: “I’m a gatekeeper. The world has no access to my technology until I receive good compensation for the work I do.”
In which case, I don’t know what I’m buying, so I’m not going to hand over my money. Please explain again how copyright maximalism makes you rich?
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If copyright maximalism made Tero Pulkinnen rich, he wouldn’t be here constantly trying to cocksuck the RIAA when they don’t even know this fucknugget from Finland even exists.
Of course, that’s his entire gameplan – surely Cary Sherman-senpai’s going to have to notice his blind dedication to harsh IP law and force the government of Finland to make Meshpage the state religion. The problem is that it’s a pretty fucking terrible gameplan.
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Yes, it seems that you don’t know how to tell a rhetorical question from a serious one. (-_Q)
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And how many faculties did you need to strain to pen out that genius rebuttal?
Was it painful?