When is copying not plagiarism?

Something about the finger pointing at the moon, I think. If Fred tells students “the modern concept of ‘subculture’ derives ultimately from the rather different model developed by David Matza”, and Fred’s colleague Jane gives a lecture two years later telling a different group of students that “David Matza’s ‘subterranean values’ model is the ultimate source of the – rather different – contemporary concept of ‘subculture'”, no harm has been done: the argument isn’t any the less true (or sustainable), and Matza is still there to be read. Ultimately putting forward new and interesting ideas that you can stand by isn’t central to teaching, whereas it is to research.

Shouldn’t your first response have been to completely reassess your ideas?

The concept of plagiarism, and the cult of originality, are aspects of the propertization of culture which also shows up as IP law and order (including the extreme surveillance now being pushed by the authorities with regard to the Internet). As a property issue it is part of the struggle for power which mostly benefits those who already have power, in short, the class war.

Another interesting question is, “When is not copying plagiarism?”

How would you have felt if government adviser had published the speech, still without attribution? I wouldn’t expect the adviser to provide references in a speech, but I would in a publication. Passing off someone else’s ideas as your own is plagiarism. It might be worse if another academic does it, but that does not entail that it is not even a little wrong.

I think that using another person’s words or ideas without attribution is almost always plagiarism. This is independent of whether or not current copyright laws make any sense. We must distinguish between the “right to attribution” and most of the other “rights” provided by current copyright law. Most of the other “rights” (e.g. the right to receive financial compensation; the right to control the manner and context in which your creative work is used, etc.) are things which authors, artists and other creators are often willing to surrender (and perhaps sometimes should surrender), and which are increasingly unenforceable and untenable anyways, given modern digital communications technology. But even fairly radical opponents of traditional copyright, who think “information wants to be free”, still generally want to receive credit and attribution for their creative work.

So I think that when a government official or another academic instructor uses your material without any attribution, that still counts as plagiarism. The question is, is it harmful plagiariasm? How much has been taken from you? This depends on what benefits you could have expected to receive if you had received proper credit.

We academics are lucky that we live in a world where our financial compensation is not directly tied to our creative output. So we are generally quite happy to make our work freely available, e.g. on our webpages, preprint servers, etc. Some of us even e-publish entire textbooks for free. The “economy” of academia is not driven by money. However, it is driven by reputation. An academic’s entire career depends on what other academics think of her, which, in turn, depends on their recognition of her creative work —mainly her research. So for this reason, we take plagiarism of academic research very, very seriously. Because if you steal the credit for another academic’s research, then you are stealing from her the only thing which really matters, which is the recognition and admiration of her peers.

But an academic’s reputation does not depend on her teaching nearly as much as it does on her research. A lot of the pedagogical materials we create feel pretty “generic” —there is a sense in which “anyone” could have made something pretty similar. It is not a unique reflection of our creative genius. So we don’t really care whether we get credit or not. Our status in the academic community doesn’t depend on it. For this reason, I think many academics are much more willing to concede the credit for their pedagogical creativity. This is perhaps why it “doesn’t feel like plagiarism” when your graduate student cribs your lecture slides. Technically, it is plagiarism, but it’s pretty harmless to you.

What about the government official? Well, suppose that you were hoping to get a position as a policy consultant or civil servant in the government. Or suppose that you worked in some field of academia where having your work cited by a government official would be seen as the supreme recognition of your academic merit. In this case, having your words quoted without attribution by the government official would have robbed you of a huge opportunity for career advancement. Thus, you would have been extremely upset by the official’s “plagiarism”.

However, apparently neither of these things is true for you; you aren’t looking for a job in the government, and your academic career doesn’t benefit from government kudos. Instead, as someone who just wants to influence public policy, you are quite happy to see a government official “borrow” your words and ideas, whether he gives you credit or not. Thus, from your point of view, this is “harmless” plagiarism.

I think students should imitate, which starts with some pretty close copy. And, researchers definitely should replicate, which, again, is closely akin to copying. And, of course, intellectual property, as a sunk-cost investment in a non-rival good, should be freely used: information wants to be free, and culture thrives on the mash-up.

Somehow, the Emersonian imperative to be original in one’s efforts has crossed wires with the injunction against cheating, which is to make no effective effort at all. And, the dominating cheaters of our political economy, the rentiers, those greedy drones, brand as thieves all, who defy their efforts to create scarcity where none need exist.

Doesn’t it have to do with the expectations of the audience? People reading academic work expect the words contained therein, if not the ideas, to be the author’s own. A teacher expects the same of student papers. But students do not expect such of a teacher’s syllabus or other materials, nor of a politician’s words.

@16
Context is surely part of the equation.

Citing Newton when talking about LeBron James’ gravity defying dunk to friends in a bar would be ridiculous…doing so in a paper which purports to calculate the amount of force necessary to shatter the backboard would not be.

The politician in the OP could certainly have mentioned “As many of you may have seen in the most recent party magazaine….” even if he didn’t specifically cite author name, volume and page number as he might have in an academic reference. That would at least be a nod that the presented ideas had some inspiration, somewhat akin to a ‘works consulted’ listing where you might not be lifting ideas, quotes or conclusions verbatim but a review of them had an influence on the orginal thoughts now being presented.

The Grad Student in the OP needn’t put “property of Harry” at the bottom of every page, particularly since the work was freely shared by the source – but the classy thing to do is to still make mention of the fact of sharing in an appropriate way. Perhaps when handing them out say something like “This syllabus came from my great mentor Harry, hopefully I haven’t messed it up too much with my additions”….credit is like smiles the more shared the more received.

People who give credit it tend to get it.

15: I recycled the same paper in undergrad & grad school Shakespeare classes. Not a good thing to do, but I can’t be unique in that.

js.: “But if somebody incorporated something from a working paper I’d shared with them in their own work and didn’t include an attribution, I’d be pretty damn upset.”

This seems to echo the OP, and point to the logic of the entire distinction being made here. Harry starts from the idea that certain kinds of copying bother him– and would lead him to characterize them as plagiarism–and others don’t. The starting point of his argument, then, is his emotional response to the different forms, and he assumes that there must be an under-articulated rationale for this, that the two things really are different for intellectual reasons, and not merely conventional ones. But it may well be that certain kinds of practices are just accepted –not because they are intellectually justified or have a different end that defines acceptable methods and means– but because we are inured to them. Why is it OK to share teaching materials without attribution? Because that’s what we (at least some of us) do. Why is it OK for public figures to use published writings verbatim in a speech? Because we expect that kind of behavior. If asked to articulate the difference between these occasions, we can come up with distinctions in role and purpose that appear to legitimate different standards, but we can just as easily come up with reasons why these behaviors are not acceptable and should be reformed to a uniform standard.

People reading academic work expect the words contained therein, if not the ideas, to be the author’s own. A teacher expects the same of student papers.

But, why? I expect the student to make the prescribed effort, because the effort is prescribed as a learning process, but I wouldn’t prescribe originality to a student at an early or intermediate stage of learning.

As the OP rightly says, academic work should be accurately footnoted — a critical part of the exercise is often scholarly context. But, some of the most useful (if not always high status) work is the carefully refined summary or survey or restatement, and the useful if decidedly unoriginal, but well-defined and familiar terms, frameworks and phrases, is fully expected and desirable. It cannot, and should not, all be original, but half-baked discoveries and innovations, in which the only truly original things are the mistakes.

I was reading the blog of an Irish law lecturer some months ago who reported that he had been at a conference which was attended by a judge. The judge mentioned to the lecturer that in a recent judgment he had quoted a paper by the lecturer , but had not named the source because it’s not the done thing when the author is still alive.

The starting point of his argument, then, is his emotional response to the different forms, and he assumes that there must be an under-articulated rationale for this, that the two things really are different for intellectual reasons, and not merely conventional ones.

I can’t speak for Harry, but I certainly am not “starting from an emotional response” and then looking for a rationalization. It’s perfectly clear to me why I would, well, let’s consider myself wronged in one case and not in the other.* I alluded to the reason at the end of the first paragraph of my last, but quite simply no one “rejects” a lecture slide, say, because it’s not original; things often stand otherwise with research.

More importantly, you’re drawing a distinction between “intellectual reasons” and “conventional reasons” that’s pretty obscure to me. At any rate, these don’t seem like mutually exclusive categories. Some sort of behavior, or a certain sort of distinction, could be perfectly well justifiable (backed by “intellectual reasons”?) yet only make sense within a specific set of social practices (“conventions”).

Maybe that’s horribly abstract. Look, if you read 18th century academics or scholars, e.g., their standards of citation—of attribution—are utterly inadequate by today’s standards. But it would be bizarre to conclude that they were horribly deficient at a basic aspect of good scholarship.

“If an academic had done that, I would have remained irritated (for about 20 minutes, I imagine, I really don’t care that much), and I think that it would have counted as plagiarism. If a student did the same thing I would regard it as serious academic misconduct.”)

Not clear to me why it is a mild source of irritation, and maybe plagiarism, when an academic does it, but “serious academic misconduct” when a student does it. Surely the academic should be held to a higher standard than the student.

I think people have basically said this already, but basically the issue is, not reusing or reproducing work, but claiming credit for work you didn’t do. If the political advisor had prefaced his remarks by saying, “the following is an idea I came up with originally myself, thus proving that I can be relied to come up with neat ideas,” he would pretty clearly be doing something wrong. When you read a student’s paper, you’re not primarily looking for valuable knowledge and ideas, you’re looking for evidence that the student has mastered the material in question; by copying someone else’s work, the student is presenting false evidence.
A scholarly article is both providing ideas and proving the worth of the author; but if I submitted an article I hadn’t written, and prefaced it with, “I didn’t write this, but the author is for some reason unable to submit it,” I don’t think there’d be any moral problem.

I think people have basically said this already, but basically the issue is, not reusing or reproducing work, but claiming credit for work you didn’t do.

When you read a student’s paper, you’re not primarily looking for valuable knowledge and ideas, you’re looking for evidence that the student has mastered the material in question; by copying someone else’s work, the student is presenting false evidence. A scholarly article is both providing ideas and proving the worth of the author;

;-)

If plagiarism is wrongly attributing another’s work to yourself, then it is obvious that you cannot possibly plagiarize yourself — the author’s monopolies remain with the author. I am trying to figure out what this phrase is actually aiming at. The best I can do is suppose that one might feel that one’s implicit deal with one’s audience was to provide new material. On the other hand, artists, scientists, and others often revise their works,
or copy material from one work to another, and are not therefore said to be self-plagiarists (usually). The term seems to be applicable only to lower castes, such as journalists.

I think the thing to say is that it’s plagiarism. But since you say it isn’t a big deal, it sort of thereby ceases to be a problem. You have retroactively given permission for him to quote you without attribution. It’s kind of like if someone steals $20 and you catch them but then you say ‘that’s alright, take it you poor man,’ then it sort of retroactively makes it alright. You’ve given him the $20. But it was still theft, what he did.

As to the grad student case, the only thing I can think is the grad student is thinking that it will look like he’s taken stuff without permission and is doing his job sloppily, even though actually he hasn’t taken anything without permission and he’s doing his job fine. He’s worried about bad appearances, rather than bad acts. It seems to me just fine for one colleague to offer another a syllabus, to adapt. On the other hand, I would sort of expect the student to thank you, to the students. ‘I’ve adapted this syllabus from one Prof. Brighouse kindly offered, as something to work from, since he’s taught this course before and I never have.’ Which solves the appearance problem, too, thereby making everything peachy.

@Tony Lynch Quite possibly, though perhaps not the one you are thinking of. Then again, perhaps that one.

Anarcissie @ 38

On the other hand, artists, scientists, and others often revise their works,
or copy material from one work to another, and are not therefore said to be self-plagiarists (usually). The term seems to be applicable only to lower castes, such as journalists.

Actually, the place I have heard the term “self-plagiarism” used is in the context of academic publications. Because this is a context where, as you put it, “one’s implicit deal with one’s audience was to provide new material.” Actually, it’s a pretty explicit deal; when you submit a paper for publication, you must explicitly aver: “This material has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere”. The reason is that journals (especially top journals) don’t want to waste their page space or their readers’ time publishing unoriginal or re-hashed material. Also, an academic’s research performance is measured (in part) by the number of (good) publications she has, so publishing the same (or very similar) material in more than one place is a sort of “double-counting”.

That having been said, there are contexts where some forms of “self-plagiarism” are acceptable in academia, if not exactly respectable. First, people doing interdisciplinary research might publish two very different versions of the same paper, in two different journals, targeted towards two very different audiences with different disciplinary backgrounds. Here, the “value added” is that each version of the paper is written so as to be maximally accessible to its target audience (i.e. it is written using their own disciplinary jargon, with a familiar organization, structure, and stylistic conventions; it avoids using unfamiliar terminology, etc.) Each version of the paper should explicitly cite the other version, just so that everything is above board. Since this sort of “self-plagiarism” is explicitly intended to promote interdisciplinary communication, it is considered acceptable.

Another place where “self-plagiarism” is accepted (if not exactly respected) in academic articles is in the so-called “boilerplate” material which often appears in the introduction of a paper. Here is the place where you set out the general problem, review previous literature to put your own work in context, and introduce the conceptual background and/or terminology and notation you will be using. This stuff is tedious and unoriginal and tends to be mostly the same in paper after paper, so it is considered acceptable to “borrow” a couple of sentences from one paper to the next. (Especially, e.g. in mathematics or theoretical economics, where you may have an entire page of tedious, highly technical notation and definitions, which are obligatory, but basically totally standard and unoriginal stuff.) Even here, however, verbatim copying of more than a single paragraph from another of your own papers would generally be considered a bit fishy.

Marcus Pivato,

Yes that’s what I was referring to. I don’t see why extensive copying of your own introduction and/or methods section is considered self plagiarism. The ‘meat’ of the paper is often in the results and discussion section: if that’s novel, then the paper as a whole is novel.