
Is Plagiarism Wrong? - mighty-fine
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/is-plagiarism-wrong-agnes-callard/
======
gmuslera
Intentionally copying the work of someone else, letter by letter, with the
goal of getting some kind of reward, can be seen as morally wrong.

But from there down you have a lot of shades of gray, can seven musical notes
be taken as plagiarism if you do a different song with a sucession of notes
that you didn't know from where they came (for you may be indistingishable
from your own creation), or that you never heard before? Or a full phrase, in
a different context, or a "common sense" algorythm to solve a common problem
with not so many ways to solve it?

When you are not doing a full copy, at some point you reach the level of meme
transmission, something that makes us humans, enabled the emergence of
civilization and let us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or worse, with
just independent, but similar enough, work, putting laws penalizing that turns
creation into a potential trap for whoever that doesn't have an army of
lawyers already.

------
Mediterraneo10
Plagiarism has more of a claim to being morally wrong than copyright
violation, I would say. The notion of copyright only arose a few centuries
ago, and even today a significant part of the world doesn’t really get the
concept deep down. But when it comes to plagiarism, we have attestations even
from antiquity (Martial, for instance) of creators complaining about their
work being passed off as that of someone else.

~~~
goto11
Copyright only became an issue with the printing press since no author could
make a living from publishing before that.

Before commercial publishing basically all authors where either independently
wealthy or clergy, or they were hired by the rich or powerful.

------
pitay
Here's a thought: What if there is a one or two categories missing from
attributing or not attributing?

For a piece of work you could have:

1) Attributes the sources of works that comprise it. Honest, cannot think of a
situation that it is inappropriate for people not bound by national security
considerations and the like.

2) Does not attribute but explicitly states that they did not write it.
Honest, but better to attribute. Not appropriate for anywhere the author needs
to demonstrate their skill, such as academia. Not appropriate for things that
explicitly or implicitly require attribution.

3) Does not attribute but it is implicit they didn't create it themselves.
Limited applicability to things that the original author doesn't mind people
spreading. Sharing jokes, memes and political slogans are obvious uses of
this.

4) Doesn't attribute author and implicitly or explicitly gives the impression
they were the original author. Traditional plagiarism. Utterly dishonest.

The usefulness of having these two extra categories (2 and 3) are that they
differentiate between honest and dishonest people and that authors may want to
release their works under a license that says they cannot claim they wrote the
work themselves, thereby reducing the burden of future distributors of altered
works having to include an ever-growing list of attributions as derived works
move from person to person.

------
robbrown451
I can understand a 6 year old being confused. They (maybe) aren't old enough
to grasp that actually composing something like a poem is the hard part. At
that age, memorizing and writing it down can seem like an impressive feat all
by itself, possibly even more impressive than the composing part. All the more
true for a kid under the circumstances described (challenges with English due
to immigrating, etc).

With an adult, though...I'd think they'd understand the concept of taking
credit for someone else's work being not ok.

I'm not fan of the way intellectual property law works (in particular the way
it is shoehorned into a free market system which only works efficiently on
scarce goods with non-zero marginal cost, which IP is not), but still. This
isn't really about intellectual property per se. It's still wrong to claim you
came up with things for which the copyright is long expired or never existed.
It is dishonest, and it is cheating.

This article presents an interesting childhood misunderstanding, and a
misunderstanding by adults of how a child might think (I tend to think the
teacher was rather cruel), and then spins it as if the child's point of view
is sophisticated enough to be a valid adult view. But it obviously isn't.

~~~
goto11
As I understand the story, it wasn't really about "taking credit". The kid did
not deny the poem was from a book, they just didn't understand it wasn't
supposed to be.

It was probably more a case of misunderstanding expectations. Some tradition
of education have a large emphasis on knowledge and memorization, while others
have more emphasis on personal creativity.

~~~
robbrown451
Sure, the kid was confused, but as an adult he shouldn't be.

The kid didn't value the creative side. Is he now as an adult denying the
creative part has value?

That's the only way I can take the title.

------
sentdex
The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a
programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net

Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever
expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of
examples that I've found with basic automated searching _just_ in matches to
my own personal code). I have found some seriously absurd examples where an
entire portfolio consists of my code, and the person got a job from it at a
large company.

Compare a student who writes their own code to the student who plagiarizes.

If you're the non-copy-pasta student, you're competing with the fakes for
jobs.

If you're an employer, you're tasked with figuring out who is who, and I
strongly doubt you would personally want the copy-paster at your business for
both legal and productivity reasons.

I think some people confuse plagiarism and innovation, especially when we
start to wrap in "intellectual property" into it.

Plagiarism is a shortcut used to fake skills/credentials.

Innovation is a real skill, though could be debated I am sure.

Intellectual property value is up for debate.

People who are cheating/faking their way, lying about their value/skills harms
both employers and students.

Just don't let people debating about plagiarism try to sneak in
innovation/building-upon as a means of a straw man.

We're talking copy and paste here. Maybe some synonym swaps.

~~~
celeritascelery
It’s hard to draw the line though. Is using stack overflow’s answers wrong?
What about getting an algorithm from a text book? Obviously lifting an entire
course is wrong. But nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially code, which
feels more like math then English.

~~~
sentdex
When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow,
you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different
than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

To me, it just doesn't seem like it's even remotely challenging to figure out
how to do this, or when to do this. If it's not yours, say where you got it.

When in doubt, cite it. What exactly would the harm be if you cited something
when you weren't sure if it was necessary, anyway?

~~~
celeritascelery
> When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack
> overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no
> different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

You do this? That is very impressive. I have never meant anyone who did that.
Myself included.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
I tend to put a link to the SO answer in a comment. That way whoever is
looking at it later (mostly me in a few months) can understand what prompted
that solution.

------
bernierocks
"Give with an open hand, and stop thinking about the tokens with which you
will be repaid. Be happy to be worth stealing from. The future owes you
nothing."

I see ideas like this regularly on HN, yet when it comes to the GNU/GPL,
violators are regularly excoriated. If you don't care about plagiarism, you
shouldn't care about a company making money on code you decided to give out
for free.

My point is that people that write these articles quickly change their mind
when the plagiarism enriches someone they don't like, disagree with
politically, or just don't feel deserves to profit off of it.

~~~
clarry
> My point is that people that write these articles quickly change their mind

Do you know it's the same people?

------
nabdab
Sounds like a bad apology from someone who got caught passing of others work
as their own. Yes plagiarism is wrong, and no it’s not the entirety of
academia that is wrong because you can’t get by without talent through just
copying other people’s work.

~~~
paganel
Lots of knowledge (I’d say most) was handed out to modern us as a result of
what today would be called plagiarists. It’s true, there was no grant system
in the European Middle Ages and I guess the smart folk in Baghdad were also
not that interested in being original or being seen as inventors/creators.

------
MereInterest
Yes, plagiarism is wrong.

The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of
"write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake,
rather than concluding that English is weird.

The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that
establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The
author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals,
rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.

The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a
heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how
trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric
field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to
interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably
vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas,
but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation,
subverting this heuristic.

The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate
implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther
from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads.
In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to
publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the
method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower
rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano
Formula.

In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept
is severely flawed.

~~~
comboy
I'm too lazy to read the article (hey at least I'm honest), but I think you
can have a working science/news with plagiarism.

In our western culture everything is egocentric. You work hard to be
remembered for milenia for wonderful things that you've done. We try to
mention who first observed or invented something (even though it often happens
in multiple places at once and only the most popular and best marketed person
gets the mention), but those people rarely care. Mostly because they are dead,
but also PG's latest essay[1].

You can have equally valid, working and moral system where it's rewarding
enough when your pattern is getting spread rather than anybody caring that it
was made by you. It seems to even be going in that direction with the youngest
generation, memes and stuff.

And reputation still works. You assign weight to given entity based on
previous information that it provided. Whether it was "invented" or merely
repeated doesn't matter.

1\. [http://paulgraham.com/genius.html](http://paulgraham.com/genius.html)

~~~
capableweb
I think you bring up good points. I think the only difference between Open
Source and Proprietary software is that one you're allowed to plagiarize, and
the other you're not. In the end, Open Source wins as it automatically gets
way more exposure and users, as anyone can access, copy, modify and freely
share it forever.

~~~
kiba
I am sorry, what?

Open source software license does not generally allow such thing.

~~~
Sinergy2
The GPL variants, for example, require you to allow others to plagiarize your
work.

~~~
ensignavenger
The GPLv3 specifically requires copyright notices to be kept in tact on
verbatim copies. Other popular Open Source licenses have more stringent
attribution requirements. Plagiarism is definitely not inherent to Open
Source, though it may be inherent in some licenses.

------
clouddrover
Yes, plagiarism is wrong.

The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of
"write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake,
rather than concluding that English is weird.

The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that
establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The
author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals,
rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.

The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a
heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how
trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric
field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to
interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably
vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas,
but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation,
subverting this heuristic.

The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate
implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther
from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads.
In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to
publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the
method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower
rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano
Formula.

In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept
is severely flawed.

------
rdtsc
> “ American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were jealous
> that you could do it.”

Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up
writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?

Plagiarism is a fancy word but cheating is something that kids by that age
should understand.

Also that’s a pretty darn nasty and entitled attitude from an immigrant
family, who should have been grateful for the country which received them.

> I have a simple recommendation for you: do a half-decent job teaching
> undergraduates.

Part of teaching well is sending the message that cheating is not tolerated.
It is demoralizing and stressful for honest, hard working students to see
others cheat and blow the curve.

> There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is inscribed.

Pardon the snarkiness, but there doesn’t seem to have been a moral foundation
put down in the case of this author. Yes, if parents and educators don’t build
and reinforce that foundation, then there won’t be any.

~~~
hombre_fatal
> > “ American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were
> jealous that you could do it.”

> Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up
> writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?

Yeah, yikes.

Aside from growing up with a mother who will readily defend cheating, it must
also be easier to cheat and plagiarize if you're taught to view others with
such contempt.

------
robalni
"Similarly, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a system in which we stop
crediting the original source of the idea—one would just need to find a way to
make it practicable. There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of
plagiarism is inscribed."

I think that's the main point of the article, and I agree that there is
nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The problem is just that this can lead
to other problems. One of them is lying; if you say that you made something
you didn't, you are lying. Another one is that you can get rewarded for
something you didn't make; it could be e.g. money or a job.

So in order to make it practicable we would have to find a way to either avoid
all those other problems, or to make the change so small that we don't get
those problems but in that case I don't know if there would practically be any
difference.

------
jamessb
> It is true that I did not know about “intellectual property,” but even if I
> had, that would not have helped. . . But what if I want to go around quoting
> Hamlet and claiming the words as my own? In that case, there’s no issue of
> depriving Shakespeare or his immediate descendants of the money that is
> rightfully theirs. It is at that point that plagiarism norms kick in.

The author seems to think that copyright is just about _economic rights_ , but
in reality it also confers _moral rights_.

For example, the Berne convention states: "independent of the author's
economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author
shall have the right to claim authorship of the work".

You cannot justify violating the right to attribution/recognition of
authorship on the grounds that it does not cause any financial loss to the
author - they are independent rights.

------
daseiner1
Yes, obviously IMO. Surprised I haven’t seen it mentioned here yet but the
chief reason plagiarism is wrong in my view is that it’s typically employed in
situations in which the finished work is used to “certify” the ability to
prepare the finished work. By “stealing” that finished work, the plagiarizer
is granted credentials that they don’t deserve, thereby rotting their given
institution from within by being granted prestige without the expected
concomitant skill to match. It’s institutional poison IMO

~~~
mjw1007
I think part of the problem here is that universities have repurposed the word
"plagiarism" to include forms of cheating which it doesn't naturally cover.

For example, if a student pays someone else to write an essay, nowadays that
gets classified as plagiarism. But it's hard to see it as a theft of ideas,
any more than it's theft if I buy something from a shop.

~~~
goto11
Plagiarism is to misrepresent something as authored by yourself. Whether you
paid someone else for writing it or copied it without permission does not
matter for the plagiarism charge - the wrongdoing is the misrepresentation.

It is not the same as copyright infringement - although it might be both at
the same time if you copy something without permission and publish it under
your own name.

Plagiarism is not always illegal. Publishing a book which is ghostwritten by
someone else is not illegal AFAIK (as long as they get paid). But in education
and research it is illegal - and they don't care if you bought the material
fairly, the point is that decisions (grades, hiring, funding etc.) are based
on the assumption that the material reflects your abilities.

So it is not really "theft of ideas", it is "faking credentials".

~~~
abnry
One of the issues that makes this murkier is that it is often only social
norms and expectations that determine whether someone is misrepresenting
themselves. In the meme world, the whole purpose is to share and modify
slightly. There isn't an expectation that your post is original. In the
academic world, every single word is assumed to be original unless cited
otherwise. There are areas in between these cases, and often what someone
calls a violation is merely the case of someone misreading the social norms.

------
aklemm
This feels like another data point indicating that Internet youths are
flirting with a total rewrite of what’s right and wrong. It’s absurd.

------
jawns
One place where I think most people don't mind a little plagiarism is in joke
telling. I can't tell you how many Dad Jokes I've found on the Internet and
passed off as my own, and I think there's sort of an understanding that if you
read a joke off a Laffy Taffy wrapper, you now get to tell that joke to others
without attribution.

That said, in the professional comedy world, there's the idea of joke theft
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft)
and I think most people recognize that as more clearly an example of cheating.

------
MachineMan
"Is Plagiarism Wrong? by Agnes Callard"

Why did the author write his name in the article if the argument is that
attributing any kind of ownership or provenance is without value? It's almost
as if the author cares about his original work.

------
zozbot234
> outrage against plagiarists is about protecting idea-creators, not readers.

The author states this, but then says nothing to elaborate on their claim or
justify it. As a "user" of academic writings, it is extremely annoying to come
across stuff that's not referenced properly, has been gratuitously-reinvented
in a way that fractures the lit on some topic, etc. It's bad enough when these
things happen casually or by mistake, imagine if people actually started doing
it on purpose, merely to claim credit on others' achievements. Treating this
as a "moral" crusade of sorts seems to be totally justified.

------
fulafel
Interesting that a philosophy column on an ethical issue talks a lot about
legality in the first half. I guess it speaks to an optimistic attitude about
the role of law.

I love this bit in the references:

"1\. Any resemblances between this essay and Brian L. Frye’s forthcoming
article “Plagiarize This Paper” (IDEA: The IP Law Review
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3462144](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3462144))
are probably due to the fact that I plagiarized it in several places."

------
buboard
Incidentally, these auto-plagiarism-detection systems that academic journals
use seem to go overboard. You 're not allowed to quote yourself, and sometimes
they detect completely silly things. It's just not possible not to plagiarize
"serial section electron tomography".

~~~
creatonez
I would hope these automated systems are being used with human oversight,
anyways.

I've heard some anecdotes of students dealing with TurnItIn's flimsiness, with
the professor/teacher being too stubborn to actually re-evaluate what the tool
thinks is plagarism. But most professors out there are going to see that the
tool isn't perfect.

------
WomanCanCode
Yes. You need to give credits where it's due.

------
mjw1007
Another annoying thing is that university plagiarism policies seem to have
been largely written by humanities departments without thinking very hard
about the needs of others.

Taken literally, my local university's plagiarism policy says it would be
"academic misconduct" for a mathematics undergraduate to reproduce a known
proof of a theorem in an examination without identifying a source. Unless
things have changed greatly, this is not in fact expected of them.

------
makapuf
Lets copy this article under my domain name, attribute it to me and link to it
on hackernews. Plagiarism withdraws many incentives to create (not only
financial) and is therefore morally wrong. Copying memes is good since it
allows confrontation and emergence of best memes. But you also need incentives
to create, being money (sensible copyright) or fame (attibution)

------
mxcrossb
I think the author is making a good point here, though overstating the case.
Remember, plagiarism in academia isn’t just stealing an entire paper and
claiming it’s yours. In my narrow sub field, probably the first three
sentences of every paper’s introduction could be identical, but if I copied
those from another paper that’s plagiarism. Likewise, if my paper built on a
useful equation from another’s work, and I copied the explanation directly
from that paper, it’s plagiarism. Yet as the author said, this does little
disservice to the reader. These rules are more about properly maintaining an
academic measure of merit.

But while this is a great point, we shouldn’t abandon the problem of
plagiarism all together. Instead, just start with your moral system, say
utilitarian or a Kantian ethic, and then put it to the test. For certain, some
systems will find it intrinsically immortal regardless of the social context.

------
nswest23
I wonder if the story about memorizing Shel Silverstein’s poem is true or if
the author stole that too

------
nestorherre
Good artists copy, great artists steal ~ Picasso (remarked by Jobs).

------
kayamon
Yes.

------
jccalhoun
I teach college and often public speaking. Practically all college students
know that wholesale plagiarism is wrong but many of them still don't know how
to cite their sources.

I tell them any time you use information from another source you need to say
the source even if you use the same source 2-3 sentences in a row. Every time
I hear you give a statistic I ask myself, "Did you give a source for that?" We
do exercises where I give them paragraphs without citations and ask them to
identify all the ones that need citations. I have them do impromptu speeches
on summarizing an article and citing it multiple times. I explain the
difference between a source and a citation. I tell them I don't care about a
works cited slide. If I don't hear them say the source it doesn't count.

Many of them still give statistics without citing them.

