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Plagiarism

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Plagiarism (from Latin plagiare "to kidnap") is the practice of claiming, or implying, original authorship or incorporating material from someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object, itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution. Plagiarism can also occur unconsciously; in some cultures certain forms of plagiarism are accepted because the concept can be interpreted differently.

Within academia, plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud and offenders are subject to academic censure. In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures ranging from suspension to termination. Some individuals caught plagiarizing in academic or journalistic contexts claim that they plagiarized unintentionally, by failing to include quotations or give the appropriate citation. While plagiarism in scholarship and journalism has a centuries-old history, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier, simply by copying and pasting text from one web page to another.

Plagiarism is different from copyright infringement. While both terms may apply to a particular act, they emphasize different aspects of the transgression. Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of the copyright holder, when material is used without the copyright holder's consent. On the other hand, plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.

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Both plagiarism and copyright infringement are concepts that vary by culture. In Western thought, both are viewed negatively by many. Some people assert that this is due to the relative affluence of these nations and the monopoly they hold on information. In many other cultures, plagiarism and copyright infringement are seen as either a product of necessity, or the most expedient means to an end.

Contents

Sanctions

Academia

In the academic world, plagiarism by students is a very serious offense that can result in punishments such as a failing grade on the particular assignment (typically at the high school level) or a failing grade for the course (typically at the college or university level). For cases of repeated plagiarism, or for cases where a student has committed a severe type of plagiarism (e.g., copying an entire article and submitting it as their own work), a student may be suspended or expelled, and any academic degrees or awards may be revoked.

Repetition in student projects or paper topics between academic terms and years provides students with ample resources from which to plagiarize. Many students feel pressured to get papers done well and quickly, and with the accessibility of new technology (The Internet) it is quite possible for students to plagiarize by copying and pasting information from another source. This type of plagiarism is often easily detected by teachers, for several reasons. First, students' choice of sources is frequently unoriginal as well; instructors may receive the same passage copied from a popular source (such as Wikipedia) from several students. Second, it is often easy to tell whether or not a student is using his or her own "voice." Third, students may choose sources which are inappropriate, off-topic, or even wrong. Fourth, many universities now use plagiarism detection software.<ref>Some students still send plagiarized papers to plagiarism detectors. http://www.nysun.com/article/56158, http://individual.utoronto.ca/alex_klein/PublicPhil.htm</ref>

There is little academic research into the frequency of plagiarism in high schools, because much of the research has investigated plagiarism at the post-secondary level.<ref>http://www.ejel.org/volume-2/vol2-issue1/issue1-art25.htm research</ref> Of the forms of cheating (including plagiarism, inventing data, and cheating during an exam), students admit to plagiarism more than any other. However, this figure decreases considerably when students are asked about the frequency of "serious" plagiarism (such as copying most of an assignment or purchasing a complete paper from a website). Recent use of plagiarism detection software (see below) has given a more accurate picture of this activity's prevalence.

For professors and researchers, plagiarism is punished by sanctions ranging from suspension to termination, along with the loss of credibility and integrity. Charges of plagiarism against students and professors are typically heard by internal disciplinary committees, which students and professors have agreed to be bound by.

Journalism

Since journalism's main currency is public trust, a reporter's failure to honestly acknowledge their sources undercuts a newspaper or television news show's integrity and undermines its credibility. Journalists accused of plagiarism are often suspended from their reporting tasks while the charges are being looked into by the news organization.

The ease in copying electronic text from the Internet has lured a number of reporters into acts of plagiarism; column writers have been caught 'copying and pasting' articles and text from a number of websites, including Wikipedia.

Online Plagiarism

Since it is very easy to steal content from the web by simply copying and pasting, the problem of online plagiarism is growing. This phenomenon, also known as content scraping, is affecting both established sites <ref>Authorship gets lost on Web. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-31-net-plagiarism_x.htm?POE=TECISVA</ref> and blogs <ref>Online plagiarism strikes blog world. http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/05/08/online_plagiarism_strikes_blog_world/</ref>. The motivation is often to attract away part or all of the original site's search engine-generated web traffic and to convert these stolen visitors into revenue through the use of online ads.

Free online tools are becoming available to detect and prevent plagiarism <ref>http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-5663303-7.html, http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2005/08/30/copyscape-searches-for-scraped-content</ref>, and there are a range of approaches that attempt to limit online copying, such as disabling right clicking and placing warning banners against plagiarism on web pages. Once identified, instances of plagiarism are commonly addressed by the rightful content owners sending a DMCA removal notice to the offending site-owner, or to the ISP that is hosting the offending site.

Other contexts

Generally, although plagiarism is often loosely referred to as theft or stealing, it has not been set as a criminal matter in the courts.<ref>http://faculty.law.lsu.edu/stuartgreen/pdf/j-green2.pdf Stuart Green</ref> Likewise, plagiarism has no standing as a criminal offense in the common law. Instead, claims of plagiarism are a civil law matter, which an aggrieved person can resolve by launching a lawsuit. Acts that may constitute plagiarism are in some instances treated as copyright infringement, unfair competition, or a violation of the doctrine of moral rights. The increased availability of intellectual property due to a rise in technology has furthered the debate as to whether copyright offences are criminal.

Self-plagiarism

Self-plagiarism is the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one’s own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work. Typically, high public-interest texts are not a subject of self-plagiarism; however, the authors should not violate copyright where applicable. "Public-interest texts" include such material as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines.

In academic fields, self-plagiarism is a problem when an author reuses portions of his or her own published and copyrighted work in subsequent publications, but without attributing the previous publication.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because of legal issues regarding fair use.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Some professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have created policies that deal specifically with self-plagiarism.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> As compared to plagiarism, self-plagiarism is not yet very well-regulated. Some universities and editorial boards chose to not regulate it at all; those consider the term self-plagiarism oxymoronic since a person cannot be accused of stealing from himself.

For authors wishing to avoid potential issues when authoring new papers, the authors are strongly encouraged to follow these "best practices":

  1. Provide full disclosure — mention in the introduction that the new or derivative work incorporates texts previously published.
  2. Ensure there is no violation of copyright.
  3. Cite the old works in the references section of the new work.

Organizational publications

Plagiarism is presumably not an issue when organizations issue collective unsigned works since they do not assign credit for originality to particular people. For example, the American Historical Association's "Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct" (2005) regarding textbooks and reference books states that there is no question about taking credit for someone else's ideas. Since textbooks and encyclopedias are summaries of other scholars' work, they are not bound by the same exacting standards of attribution as original research. However, even such a book does not make use of words, phrases, or paragraphs from another text or follow too closely the other text's arrangement and organization.

Within an organization, in its own working documents, standards are looser but not non-existent. If someone helped with a report, they expect to be credited. If a paragraph comes from a law report, a citation is expected to be written down. Technical manuals routinely copy facts from other manuals without attribution, because they assume a common spirit of scientific endeavor (as evidenced, for example, in free and open source software projects) in which scientists freely share their work.

The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications Third Edition (2003) by Microsoft does not even mention plagiarism, nor does Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, Second Edition (2000) by Philip Rubens. The line between permissible literary and impermissible source code plagiarism, though, is apparently quite fine. As with any technical field, computer programming makes use of what others have contributed to the general knowledge.

It is common for university researchers to rephrase and republish their own work, tailoring it for different academic journals and newspaper articles, to disseminate their work to the widest possible interested public. However, it must be borne in mind that these researchers also obey limits: If half an article is the same as a previous one, it will be rejected. One of the functions of the process of peer review in academic writing is to prevent this type of 'recycling'.

Public figures commonly use anonymous speech writers. If a speech uses copied material, however, it is the public figure who will be embarrassed. Delaware Senator Joe Biden was forced out of the 1988 US Presidential race (but remained in the US Senate) when it was discovered that parts of his campaign speeches were plagiarized from speeches by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy.

Examples of purported or actual plagiarism

Academia

  • James A. Mackay, a Scottish historian, was forced to withdraw all copies of his biography of Alexander Graham Bell from circulation in 1998 because he plagiarized the last major work on the subject, a 1973 work. Also accused of plagiarizing material on biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Andrew Carnegie, and Sir William Wallace, he was forced to withdraw his next work, on John Paul Jones, in 1999 for an identical reason.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • Marks Chabedi, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, plagiarized his doctoral thesis. He used a work written by Kimberly Lanegran at the University of Florida and copied it nearly verbatim before submitting it to The New School. When Lanegran discovered this, she launched an investigation into Chabedi. He was fired from his professorship, and The New School revoked his Ph.D.<ref>[1]</ref> (The OCLC numbers for the dissertations are AAG9801108 and AAI9980001.)
  • Historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books. He was first accused in 2002 by two writers for copying portions about World War II bomber pilots from Thomas Childers's The Wings of Morning in his book The Wild Blue.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> After Ambrose admitted to the errors, the New York Times found further unattributed passages, and "Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged his errors and promised to correct them in later editions."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • Author Doris Kearns Goodwin interviewed author Lynne McTaggart in her 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and she used passages from McTaggart's book about Kathleen Kennedy. In 2002, when the similarities between Goodwin's and McTaggart's books became public, Goodwin stated that she had an understanding that citations would not be required for all references, and that extensive footnotes already existed. Many doubted her claims, and she was forced to resign from the Pulitzer Prize board. <ref>[2]</ref><ref>[3]</ref><ref>[4]</ref>
  • Mathematician and computer scientist Dănuţ Marcu claims to have published over 383 original papers in various scientific publications. A number of his recent papers have been proven to be exact copies of papers published earlier by other people. <ref>http://l1.lamsade.dauphine.fr/~bouyssou/Marcu.pdf</ref>
  • A University of Colorado investigating committee found Ethnic Studies professor and activist Ward Churchill guilty of multiple counts of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. The Chancellor has recommended Churchill's dismissal to the Board of Regents. Churchill was fired on 24 July 2007.<ref name="misconduct_report">Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Business

On 6 June 2007, the Financial Times published a front page article under the headline: "Pipeliners All!’ Shell’s memo to Sakhalin <ref>["Pipeliners All!’ Shell’s memo to Sakhalin]</ref>

The article was about a leaked motivational memo in the form of an email from David Greer, the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin Energy circulated to Sakhalin-2 staff. Some keen eyed readers noticed that inspirational passages were appropriated from a famous speech given by the legendary U.S. General George S. Patton, on 5 June 1944 on the eve of D-Day the Sixth of June. On 7 June 2007, a quarter page follow-up article was published in the Financial Times newspaper and on the FT.com website, under the headline: "Sakhalin motivational memo borrows heavily from Patton” <ref>"www.royaldutchshellplc.com - Sakhalin motivational memo borrows heavily from Patton”.</ref> Template:Fact

On Monday 11 June 2007, the Financial Times published another article at <ref>www.tellshell.com</ref> on the subject, this time headlined: “Motivational memos must make their message clear”. One of the opening paragraphs stated: “The memo (www.ft.com/shell) is crass, poorly punctuated and most of it wasn't even written by its author, David Greer, deputy chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell's Sakhalin Energy Investment Company. He had lifted the words of General George S. Patton with no attribution, and clumsily adapted them to spur on his team of recalcitrant pipeline engineers”.Template:Fact

On 9 June 2007, The Moscow Times published a front page article on the controversy headlined: Sakhalin Pep Talk From ‘Old Blood and Guts'.

There is a Wikipedia entry covering the David Greer memo affair entitled: Plagiarism controversy over Sakhalin-2 motivational memo

Computer games

  • Atari's video game Pong was accused by Magnavox of being a copy of the Odyssey's tennis game. Nolan Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's version at a 1972 electronics show in Burlingame, California. Bushnell then founded Atari and established Pong as its featured game. "Baer and Magnavox filed suit against Bushnell and Atari in 1973 and finally reached an out-of-court settlement in 1976. It marked the end for Odyssey and the beginning of the Atari age."<ref>"A 30 Year Odyssey for Home Video Games," Chicago Sun-Times, February 16, 2003</ref> <ref>www.pong-story.com</ref>

Film

  • The 1922 film Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker's widow sued the producers of Nosferatu, and had many of the film's copies destroyed (although some remain).<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
  • The 1990 movie Hardware was noted to have substantial similarities to the 2000 AD one-shot story "SHOK!". Following legal action, the filmmakers agreed to amend the credits to read that the movie was "inspired by" the writers of the comic strip.<ref>2000AD Online "spinoff" archive</ref>

Journalism

Literature

  • A young Helen Keller was accused in 1892 of plagiarizing Margaret T. Canby's story The Frost Fairies in her short story The Frost King. She was brought before a tribunal of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where she was acquitted by a single vote. She said she was worried she may have read The Frost Fairies and forgotten it and "remained paranoid about plagiarism ever after."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and said that this led her to write an autobiography: the one thing she knew must be original.
  • Alex Haley settled a lawsuit with Harold Courlander that cited approximately 80 passages in Haley's novel Roots as having been plagiarized from Courlander's novel The African. "Accusations that portions of 'Roots' (Doubleday hard cover, Dell paperback) consisted of plagiarized material or were concocted plagued Mr. Haley from soon after the book's publication up until his death in February 1992. In 1978, Mr. Haley was sued for plagiarism by Harold Courlander, author of the novel The African, and Haley paid him $650,000 in an out-of-court settlement."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Haley insisted that "the passages 'were in something somebody had given me, and I don't know who gave it to me . . . . Somehow or another, it ended up in the book."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Courlander's pre-trial memorandum in the lawsuit stated: "Defendant Haley had access to and substantially copied from The African. Without The African, Roots would have been a very different and less successful novel, and indeed it is doubtful that Mr. Haley could have written Roots without The African. . . . Mr. Haley copied language, thoughts, attitudes, incidents, situations, plot and character."

In his report submitted to the court in this lawsuit, Professor of English and expert witness on plagiarism, Michael Wood of Columbia University, stated: "The evidence of copying from The African in both the novel and the television dramatization of Roots is clear and irrefutable. The copying is significant and extensive....Roots...plainly uses The African as a model: as something to be copied at some times, and at other times to be modified; but always, it seems, to be consulted. . . . Roots takes from The African phrases, situations, ideas, aspects of style and of plot. . . . Roots finds in The African essential elements for its depiction of such things as a slave's thoughts of escape, the psychology of an old slave, the habits of mind of the hero, and the whole sense of life on an infamous slave ship. Such things are the life of a novel; and when they appear in Roots, they are the life of someone else's novel."

After a five-week trial in federal district court, Courlander and Haley settled the case, with Haley making a financial settlement and a statement that "Alex Haley acknowledges and regrets that various materials from The African by Harold Courlander found their way into his book Roots."

During the trial, presiding U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Ward stated, "Copying there is, period." In a later interview with BBC Television, Judge Ward stated, "Alex Haley perpetrated a hoax on the public."

During the trial, Alex Haley had maintained that he had not read The African before writing Roots. Shortly after the trial, however, an instructor of black literature at Skidmore College, Joseph Bruchac, came forward. He swore in an affidavit that in 1970 or 1971 (five or six years before the publication of Roots) he had discussed The African with Haley and had, in fact, given his "own personal copy of The African to Mr. Haley."

Music

  • George Harrison was successfully sued in a prolonged suit that began in 1971 for plagiarizing the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for the melody of his own "My Sweet Lord." <ref>[7]</ref>
  • In early 2007, Timbaland was alleged to have plagiarized several elements (both motifs and samples) in the song "Do It" on the 2006 album Loose by Nelly Furtado without giving credit or compensation. See 2007 Timbaland plagiarism controversy.
  • In early 2006, The writers of Lee Hyori's song "Get Ya" were accused of plagarizing Britney Spears' Do Somethin'. This eventually led Lee Hyori to stop promoting the song and contributed to the failure of the song and its album, Dark Angel.
  • In 1994 John Fogerty was sued for self plagiarism after leaving Fantasy Records and pursuing a solo career with Warner Brothers. Fantasy still owned the rights to the CCR library and sound. Saul Zaentz, the owner of Fantasy, claimed Fogerty's song "Old Man Down the Road" was a musical copy of the Creedence song "Run Through the Jungle." The court made a landmark decision when it ruled that an artist cannot plagiarize himself.

Politics

Senator Joseph Biden

  • Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominations when it was alleged that he had failed a 1965 introductory law school course on legal methodology due to plagiarism. "Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign . . . acknowledged 'a mistake' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing 'malevolent,' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Biden withdrew from the race September 23, 1987, and reported the law school incident to the Delaware Supreme Court. The court's Board of Professional Responsibility cleared him of any allegations.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • Biden was also accused of plagiarizing portions of his speeches, and that he had copied several campaign speeches, notably those of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He denied those charges. "And he asserted that another controversy, concerning recent reports of his using material from others' speeches without attribution, was 'much ado about nothing.'"<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Iraq War

  • In a New York Times editorial prior to the Iraq War, United States President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice explained that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted for various reasons, including the fact that Hussein had committed plagiarism. "Iraq's declaration [to the United Nations regarding the state of its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs] even resorted to unabashed plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied word-for-word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented as original text."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • On February 3, 2003, Alastair Campbell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy, released a briefing document to journalists entitled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation." It described Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programs. Journalists discovered that many sources, particularly an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi, had been copied word-for-word, including typographical errors. Journalists dubbed the document the "Dodgy Dossier." After the revelation, Blair's office issued a statement admitting that a mistake was made in not crediting its sources, but it did not concede that the quality of the documents's content was affected.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Vladimir Putin

  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of plagiarism by fellows at the Brookings Institution who allege that "[l]arge chunks of Putin's economics dissertation on planning in the natural resources sector were lifted from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh academics nearly 20 years earlier."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Wikipedia

  • In November 2006, the Associated Press reported activist Daniel Brandt's claim to have uncovered 142 articles with plagiarized content among the 12,000 Wikipedia articles he chose to search. Wikipedia administrators responded that this list misidentifed some articles where it was the allegedly original text that had plagiarized Wikipedia, and reported that they took action on the cases that involved copyright violations.<ref name=plagiarism>Template:Cite web</ref> He "called on Wikipedia to conduct a thorough review of all its articles."<ref>Template:Cite web

</ref>

Other instances

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Template:Main

  • In 1991 a Boston University investigation into allegatons of academic misconduct concluded that Martin Luther King, Jr. had plagiarized large portions of his doctoral thesis. "A committee of scholars at Boston University concluded that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, completed there in the 1950s." The BU committee recommended that King's doctoral degree should not be revoked; however, a letter is now attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate citations of sources.<ref>"Panel Confirms Plagiarism by King at BU" by Charles A. Radin, The Boston Globe, October 11, 1991</ref>
  • It has been charged that for his "I Have A Dream" speech King plagiarized the 1952 address of Archibald Carey to the Republican National Convention, the similarities being in the reference to the Samuel Francis Smith patriotic hymn "America" in the peroration followed by a listing of geographical locations from which the orator exhorts his audience to "let freedom ring." Many, however, believe that the comparisons are so slightly similar that they do not rise to the level of plagiarism. <ref>King's "I Have a Dream" Speech</ref>, <ref>Carey's Speech</ref>, <ref>My Country, 'Tis of Thee</ref>.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

William H. Swanson

Lyle Menendez

  • Lyle Menendez was suspended from Princeton University after his first semester for copying a fellow student's lab report two years before he and his brother murdered their parents. <ref>[8]</ref>

See also

References

Template:Reflist

External links

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