On Plagiarism
Monday, January 29, 2007, 12:09 AM - Copyfight
Richard A. Posner, The Atlantic Monthly; April 2002
Recently two popular historians were discovered to have lifted passages from other historians' books. They identified the sources in footnotes, but they failed to place quotation marks around the purloined passages. Both historians were quickly buried under an avalanche of criticism. The scandal will soon be forgotten, but it leaves in its wake the questions What is "plagiarism"? and Why is it reprobated? These are important questions. The label "plagiarist" can ruin a writer, destroy a scholarly career, blast a politician's chances for election, and cause the expulsion of a student from a college or university. New computer search programs, though they may in the long run deter plagiarism, will in the short run lead to the discovery of more cases of it.
We must distinguish in the first place between a plagiarist and a copyright infringer. They are both copycats, but the latter is trying to appropriate revenues generated by property that belongs to someone else—namely, the holder of the copyright on the work that the infringer has copied. A pirated edition of a current best seller is a good example of copyright infringement. There is no copyright infringement, however, if the "stolen" intellectual property is in the public domain (in which case it is not property at all), or if the purpose is not appropriation of the copyright holder's revenue. The doctrine of "fair use" permits brief passages from a book to be quoted in a book review or a critical essay; and the parodist of a copyrighted work is permitted to copy as much of that work as is necessary to enable readers to recognize the new work as a parody. A writer may, for that matter, quote a passage from another writer just to liven up the narrative; but to do so without quotation marks—to pass off another writer's writing as one's own—is more like fraud than like fair use.
"Plagiarism," in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work—for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I'm using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch's life of Mark Antony: "on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her" becomes "on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool." (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot "stole" the famous opening of Shakespeare's barge passage, "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water" becoming "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble."
Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s "quote" extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment.
If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism. They show that not all unacknowledged copying is "plagiarism" in the pejorative sense. Although there is no formal acknowledgment of copying in my examples, neither is there any likelihood of deception. And the copier has added value to the original—this is not slavish copying. Plagiarism is also innocent when no value is attached to originality; so judges, who try to conceal originality and pretend that their decisions are foreordained, "steal" freely from one another without attribution or any ill will.
But all that can be said in defense of a writer who, merely to spice up his work, incorporates passages from another writer without acknowledgment is that the readability of his work might be impaired if he had to interrupt a fast-paced narrative to confess that "a predecessor of mine, ___, has said what I want to say next better than I can, so rather than paraphrase him, I give you the following passage, indented and in quotation marks, from his book ___." And not even that much can be said in defense of the writer who plagiarizes out of sheer laziness or forgetfulness, the latter being the standard defense when one is confronted with proof of one's plagiarism.
Because a footnote does not signal verbatim incorporation of material from the source footnoted, all that can be said in defense of the historians with whom I began is that they made it easier for their plagiarism to be discovered. This is relevant to how severely they should be criticized, because one of the reasons academic plagiarism is so strongly reprobated is that it is normally very difficult to detect. (In contrast, Eliot and Manet wanted their audience to recognize their borrowings.) This is true of the student's plagiarized term paper, and to a lesser extent of the professor's plagiarized scholarly article. These are particularly grave forms of fraud, because they may lead the reader to take steps, such as giving the student a good grade or voting to promote the professor, that he would not take if he knew the truth. But readers of popular histories are not professional historians, and most don't care a straw how original the historian is. The public wants a good read, a good show, and the fact that a book or a play may be the work of many hands—as, in truth, most art and entertainment are—is of no consequence to it. The harm is not to the reader but to those writers whose work does not glitter with stolen gold.
On Plagiarism
17 comments a patents christmas tale
Tuesday, December 26, 2006, 03:25 PM - Copyfight
Scrooge and intellectual property rights
by Joseph E Stiglitz, professor At Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens's story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of "intellectual property rights."
Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. Thomas Jefferson, America's third president, put it more poetically than modern economists (who refer to "zero marginal costs" and "non-rivalrous consumption") when he said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. Using knowledge to help someone does not prevent that knowledge from helping others. Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. Restricting the use of medical knowledge not only affects economic efficiency, but also life itself.
We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits. It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.
In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year's treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65; 170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version.1 Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more.
Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said "We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way ... You can't expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale."2
Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way. For instance, the human genome project decoded the human genome within the target timeframe, but a few scientists managed to beat the project so they could patent genes related to breast cancer. The social value of gaining this knowledge slightly earlier was small, but the cost was enormous. Consequently the cost of testing for breast cancer vulnerability genes is high. In countries with no national health service many women with these genes will fail to be tested. In counties where governments will pay for these tests less money will be available for other public health needs.
A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.
The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world—and even their productivity—as any other that they are given.
The medical prize fund could be one of several ways to promote innovation in crucial diseases. The most important ideas that emerge from basic science have never been protected by patents and never should be. Most researchers are motivated by the desire to enhance understanding and help humankind. Of course money is needed, and governments must continue to provide money through research grants along with support for government research laboratories and research universities. The patent system would continue to play a part for applications for which no one offers a prize . The prize fund should complement these other methods of funding; it at least holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter. Importantly, the medical prize fund would ensure that we make the best possible use of whatever knowledge we acquire, rather than hoarding it and limiting usage to those who can afford it, as Scrooge might have done. It is a thought we should keep in mind this Christmas.
1 Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, USA
note. Joseph E Stiglitz was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000 and a member and then chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001.
Read the article in the British Medical Journal where it was originally published.
Hoping to Be a Model, I.B.M. goes open patent
Tuesday, September 26, 2006, 05:59 PM - Copyfight
"The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial capital in a global knowledge economy," -said Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s chief executive. "If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to do something, it's going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future."
Read the whole article in the NYTimes
artillería: napster & the concert value
Monday, August 28, 2006, 09:56 PM - Copyfight
In a study about ticket prices for concerts, the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger found that between 1983 and 2003, a period in which MTV, Napster, the iPod and other technologies extended the reach of top acts, the share of concert revenue taken by the top 5 percent of artists increased to 84 percent, from 62 percent.
As read in A Big Star May Not a Profitable Movie Make, NYTimes
A closed mind about an open world
Wednesday, August 23, 2006, 09:03 PM - Copyfight
Over the past 15 years, a group of scholars has finally persuaded economists to believe something non-economists find obvious: "behavioural economics" shows that people do not act as economic theory predicts.
However, this is not a vindication of folk wisdom over the pointy-heads. The deviations from "rational behaviour" were not the wonderful cornucopia of humanist motivations you might imagine. There were patterns. We were risk-averse when it came to losses - likely to overestimate chances of loss and underestimate chances of gain, for example. We rely on heuristics to frame problems but cling to them even when they are contradicted by the facts. Some of these patterns are endearing; the supposedly "irrational" concerns for equality that persist in all but Republicans and the economically trained, for example. But most were simply the mapping of cognitive bias. We can take advantage of those biases, as those who sell us expensive and irrational warranties on consumer goods do. Or we can correct for them, like a pilot who is trained to rely on his instruments rather than his faulty perceptions when flying in heavy cloud.
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.
Keep Reading A closed mind about an open world by James Boyle in the Finantial Times.
Gracias Ricardo.
Regarding Copyright: Is a Scent Like a Song?
Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 06:12 PM - Copyfight
In its ruling, the court, the Cour de Cassation, denied the petition of a perfume maker, who claimed she deserved to continue receiving royalties from a former employer, even after she had been fired. The court stated, "The fragrance of a perfume, which results from the simple implementation of expertise" does not constitute "the creation of a form of expression able to profit from protection of works of the mind."
To confuse matters, a French court of appeals ruled the opposite last January, determining that a perfume could be a "work of the mind" protected by intellectual property law. It ordered a Belgian company to pay damages to the perfume and cosmetics giant L'Oréal, which sued it for producing counterfeits of best-selling L'Oréal perfumes.
The rulings have the noses and the perfume houses of France twitching nervously. Many "noses" consider the scents they create as important and valuable as paintings or poems.
Read the rest of the article, originally published by the NYTimes.
All Rights Reserved: a history of American copyright law by Jeff Siegel
Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 05:06 PM - Copyfight
<i>To every cow her calf, and to every book its copy.” -- Irish King Dermott, 6th c. C.E., in his decision Finnian v. Columba (The “Abbot's Psalter” case). Probably apocryphal.</i>
it's part of American law, and among other things the philosophical and legal foundation for "work for hire," the idea that an author can be hired by an institution, paid a flat fee, and rescind all rights to the work they've created, as if the author were never involved in the first place; the publisher, not as agent of the author, but as the author. The vast majority of cultural and intellectual work is created within a work for hire arrangement, the creator ceding her work to the institution that manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells it (and it's the work, the expression of the idea, that's covered in copyright, not the idea itself). There's much talk from spokespeople for the various trade groups involved in bringing litigation on copyright matters (RIAA, MPAA, BSA for software companies, etc.) that copyright infringement harms most the authors of the work, that it takes money out of their pockets, undoing the incentive to create more work for the public good. But due to these work-for-hire arrangements, it's the opposite that's true; there is no significant correlation between a corporate entity controlling a copyright on a work and the creator of that work making money from its sale. Nowhere is this clearer than in the music business. By now you've heard story after story of artists getting screwed by their labels. The minuscule royalties and recoupable costs and so forth are only a manifestation of the real issue: the constant downward pressure of a big record label onto the livelihood of its only real asset, the recording artist who creates the product that generates their profit. As a generalization, there are few worse positions to be in in the commercial arts than major-label recording artist. Book publishing works on a fundamentally similar model, but rarely do publishers make their writers recoup marketing costs or advances; film and broadcasting, especially at big-money levels, are fully unionized, and everyone involved makes a set wage. So how do record labels get away with making tidy profits on ubiquitous songs, while the artists rarely see a dime and usually end up in debt?
Read All Rights Reserved in Stylus Magazine.
via
Back Next
