A polemic against plagiarism—from the Ethics Editor of The Good Men Project.
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Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize –
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.
—Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
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I’m a writer. It’s how I make my living now. I choose words, form sentences, arrange paragraphs, and compose a coherent piece of writing carefully crafted to appeal to an audience.
Raw material + labor = product.
It’s work. Hard work. An investment of energy, effort, time, and talent into giving birth to an original work of art.
You may not consider an article such as “21 Signs Your Relationship Is Doomed” to have anything to do with art, but art is not all about aesthetics or beauty.
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You may not consider an article such as “21 Signs Your Relationship Is Doomed” to have anything to do with art, but art is not all about aesthetics or beauty.
Art is about original work that comes from a place inside yourself.
You also may not accept the comparison of writing an article to giving birth, but interestingly, the roots of the word plagiarism derive “from Latin plagiarius “kidnapper, seducer, plunderer, one who kidnaps the child or slave of another.” (Online Etymology Dictionary)
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Copying is not art (unless you’re creating an illuminated manuscript). Copying is a mechanical process that requires no talent, and virtually no time, effort, or energy other than the keystrokes involved in cutting and pasting. Copying someone’s writing—if you merely imitate style—is a part of the writer’s learning process and, with proper acknowledgment, a flattering overture to the one being imitated.
Copying someone’s writing and claiming it as your own is stealing, pure and simple.
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Copying someone’s writing and claiming it as your own is stealing, pure and simple.
It’s no different than lifting a pack of gum from a convenience store, walking into a bank and demanding all the money, or using someone else’s credit card.
It’s no different, because you’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you, and benefiting from its possession and use.
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Before the Internet, plagiarism was harder to spot, because books, magazines, and newspapers were not digitized and searchable electronically.
The Internet makes it easier to find instances of plagiarism—and to avoid them—but it also encourages plagiarism.
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The Internet makes it easier to find instances of plagiarism—and to avoid them—but it also encourages plagiarism, because people operate under the misconception that no one owns or can claim copyright on anything published or shared on the web—that everything out there is free and fair game.
It’s not.
Unless work is in the public domain, or has been released into the public domain by the creator, or is freely licensed on Creative Commons, it is almost surely copyrighted.
Blogs are copyrighted, even if there is no copyright symbol.
Photographs are copyrighted, even if they’ve been shared all over Facebook.
And lifting a few sentences from a published article without attribution does not constitute fair use.
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The impetus for this article was BuzzFeed’s firing Benny Johnson when Twitter users identified content he had lifted from other sources.
BuzzFeed did the right thing. Benny had to go, and journalistic integrity had to be maintained. What impressed me most, though, is that BuzzFeed apologized for misleading readers and defined plagiarism as an act of disrespect towards them.
That is a powerful statement.
Because plagiarism is about ethics, and ethics is about leadership, and leadership is about respect.
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Because plagiarism is about ethics, and ethics is about leadership, and leadership is about respect.
Yes, it took me a while to write that sentence.
And you can quote me—with attribution, of course.
Photo—Don Hankins/Flickr