

The ethics of recycling content: Jonah Lehrer accused of self-plagiarism - timwiseman
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/the-ethics-of-recycling-content-jonah-lehrer-accused-of-self-plagiarism/

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Jesse_Ray
I reject the concept of self-plagiarism because I believe that people are
entitled to use their own works as they see fit, provided that they have not
transfered ownership or copyright. Even so, that is beside the point because
the issue has nothing to do with plagiarism.

The issue has to do with the violation of the terms of the contract. If the
publisher wanted something unoriginal, then they would make an explicit
request to publish a previous work. (In other words, the publisher would say
to the author, "We want to publish your previous work X. Can we negotiate a
price?") When no such request is made and the publisher instead offers to pay
the author to write something, it is implied that they want something
original. That implicit request is part of the contractual agreement between
the author and the publisher. When the author publishes something unoriginal
and then takes money for the service of publishing something that is original,
then the author has effectively stolen the money.

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jwu59
I don't get why this matters to me, the reader. If he writes well and I learn
something, why would I care if he wrote about it before.

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rsanchez1
Well, I don't imagine it would matter much to the reader. There are people who
say it's not right for him to do it, but who it really matters to are the New
Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, depending on who owns the rights to Jonah
Lehrer's writings while he was at the New Yorker.

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gantz
How much less of an offense would it be if he took more time to just reword
things, even if the same message was kept?

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tadfisher
Depends on the extent of the rewording. The courts have methods to test for
derivative works, and testing for a rote or uncreative transformation is one
of those.

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NeutronBoy
If you're going to re-use your own work and present it to readers, at least
acknowledge that you're doing it. This American Life does this well, starting
each re-run with a note saying, 'This is a re-run and we are playing it
because XYZ'

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gojomo
As a columnist for my college paper, hopelessly past my deadline on a week's
column, I recycled (with slight updates) some earlier work I'd first done for
another campus paper.

I knew it was a sort of cop out, a disfavored option. But since it was my own
work appearing under my own name in a signed opinion/satirical slot, I thought
a re-run of some of my better, less-seen work was preferable to offering
nothing. I didn't yet realize that 'self-plagiarism' was even a thing. I got
the message from the disappointed tsk-tsk look/tone from my editor.

I think it wound up running with a disclaimer about having appeared before
elsewhere. Does precise self-attribution cure self-plagiarism?

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rsanchez1
The title threw me off. When I read self-plagiarism, I read that as using your
own work that you already wrote before. Reading into it a little more revealed
the catch. He took content he wrote for another publication and used it for
his current publication. The issue is: who owns it, the publication or the
writer? As the author points out, it comes down to what's in the writer's
contract, although I have to agree with the author: even if it was in the
writer's contract that he retains copyright over his articles and he is
legally permitted to reuse his work for other publications, it just doesn't
feel right that he used work someone else paid him to do to finish work his
current employer is paying him to do.

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jrockway
_even if it was in the writer's contract that he retains copyright over his
articles and he is legally permitted to reuse his work for other publications,
it just doesn't feel right that he used work someone else paid him to do to
finish work his current employer is paying him to do._

If programmers thought like this, we would all still be using ENIAC.

