MODERATOR NOTE: This interesting discussion on plagiarism is beginning to move a bit away from how to deal with it relative to students and the classroom and into more theoretical realms that are more appropriate on LIFE than on TEACH. For future posters on this thread, could those who want to discuss plagiarism in the abstract (whether it's right or wrong, and why) begin discussing the issue on LIFE?
If your post connects the ideas more directly to classroom practices, of course post it here on TEACH.
Thanks.
Karen
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Then they lost their jobs. If there was nothing wrong with plagiarism, why would they be sacked?
</susan>
i'm not saying there's nothing wrong with it, i'm saying that stealing ideas
and stealing money are not the same. it's the difference between stealing an
mp3 off the net and stealing someon's cd. the latter actually prevents the
owner of the cd from having the cd.
failure to preserve the attribution (ultimately metadata? at least for a
single piece?) when transmitting ideas isn't the same as stealing money.
most people who want to be ethical about it will simply add a disclaimer
that it's "someone else's" idea, without doing the legwork to determine
whose idea it was.
how many teachers on this list have used images off the net in class without
the express written consent of the image's copyright holder? or shown a
movie in class, without the express written consent of the copyright holder?
or bought a book used instead of new, depriving the author of royalties?
taking credit for someone else's work if both you and the author of that
work intend to circulate it within the same community (class, seminar,
country, world) than it's zero sum--you get credit (precluding the original
author from getting credit) or they do. my experience with students
plagiarizing has them taking work from people outside the class--hence their
theft has little effect on the author. academics losing their phds is just
as much about credibility; you'll be blacklisted for faking data, too.
i think plagiarism and academic honesty (plagiarizing a paper, stealing an
answer key ahead of a test, whatever) is wrong. i'm not contesting that. but
there's degrees to wrong; parking in a handicapped spot when you're not
handicapped is not the moral equivalent of ethnic cleansing. steaking an
idea or sequence of words, notes, etc. isn't equivalent to stealing material
commodities. maybe one day we'll be on a reputation economy--lots of sci fi
authors seem to like the idea--but we're not there yet.
(how many writers, even at 5 or 10 cents a word, make minimum wage?)
nate
