
The New Plagiarism - pg
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=3sb7fgmhd1qszg1g6tgbtjx5kj95v8ny
======
Chocobean
"The New Plagiarism" is the plague of the sense of entitlement.

If you are able to duplicate someone else's work, does it become yours?
Schools teach us no; we could be expelled. Fair enough.

If you make minor edits to someone else's work, does it become yours?
Apparently so. The author's experience tells us that we can certainly make the
claim that the piece is "public", and that annecdotes were "borrowed", but
only borrowed as much from the original as it borrowed from everyone else.

We live in a society where the gatherer becomes the discoverer, the sponsor
becomes the artist, and the investors become the founders. If they've had a
finger in that pie, it's their pie.

Is this not another sign of our society's bloated sense of entitlement and
ingratitude?

------
ironkeith
This also illustrates how difficult it can be to judge the validity of
information on the internet. Information is getting distorted and twisted in a
complex game of chinese telephone, and defining authority and truth are left
largely to Google. How often do you check other pages after you find an answer
on Google (especially if its a Wikipedia page)?

------
asciilifeform
This article also shows just where we (non-journalists) stand on the food
chain compared to those with direct access to the mass media machines. We are
_nothing_. There is no mechanism whereby a blogger can force an establishment
journalist to give credit where credit is due. The legal system will not help
you. Sue, and you will be fought vigorously, and exhaust whatever meager
savings you might have on legal fees - with no guarantee of a win.

They have the real power and they know it. If you, an outsider, have some
insight which the mainstream press considers valuable (a great rarity!), it
will be stolen and attributed to a "respectable" figure. And there won't be a
thing you can do about it.

~~~
smhinsey
i can't tell how much of what you wrote is intended as hyperbole, but assuming
you were straightforward in your intent, i believe you're overreaching. it
isn't easy for outsiders to break into the mainstream media, but it happens.

recent examples of this would be nate silver and rachel maddow, but there are
plenty more.

------
rms
I don't think any external observer would try to argue that this wasn't
plagiarism. The newspaper just has a vested interest in defending itself from
such a serious accusation.

------
neilo
Not asking permission or evening linking to a source for your information is,
at least, a discoverable faux pas which can easily lead to some nasty public
backlash. If the internet had no memory whatsoever (caches, search engines,
archive.org, etc.) then I can only imagine the insane plagiarism that would
follow.

------
lg
Who cares who came up with what? Eventually that'll be too hard and pointless
to keep track of anyway.

~~~
jmtulloss
The point isn't that we need to know who came up with what, it's that we need
to know the justification for their assertion.

If it becomes common knowledge that "the Republican party lost their way after
2000", people will stop backing up the statement. As time goes on, nobody will
know why "Republicans lost their way after 2000". In the future, careful
historians will want to know who first made the assertion so that they can
understand where this general knowledge came from.

~~~
lg
I get it--as it gets impossible to find out who came up with what, content
creators are an indirect casualty but historians are a direct one because
that's their actual job! That's sort of funny. I guess they'll have to use
fancy statistical analysis like everyone else now.

~~~
silentbicycle
Well, historians work with primary and secondary sources. The internet
collectively hoards and archives insane amounts of information, so it's a lot
to dig through, but sources are often still there somewhere, and they are
often copied verbatim.

A big part of history has always been gathering and interpreting sources, to
figure out the validity of assertions like that (whether contemporary or
retroactive). Hearsay and speculation are nothing new. As the article notes,
history isn't about reciting names and dates, it's about making a case to
support or refute an interpretation of what happened, based on available
evidence.

