Plagiarism

In the academic world, plagiarism is always viewed as bad. At first glance, this seems to make perfect sense.  Students who copy someone else instead of doing the work themselves are cheating themselves and undermining the value of their degree, and academics who present others’ research as their own are defrauding the community and claiming credit they don’t deserve.  But the issue of plagiarism is rarely as black and white as someone who takes another person’s work whole and passes it off as their own.  There are many, many gray areas.  For example, in academia we routinely use the work of others to prove our arguments or reinforce our findings.  As long as those works are properly cited, this is completely legitimate.  But what happens when a student simply makes a mistake and cites something improperly?  The rules for MLA citations change constantly, but it is hard to make the argument that someone who used the outdated format was really trying to pass of the work as their own.  What about when the student accidentally forgets to credit the work?  What about when a student has done so much research that they forget where something comes from or unconciously says something very similar to something they read?  It is perfectly acceptable to state “known facts” without citing a source, but who decides what a known fact is?  If I learn something from a textbook I am expected to cite the book, even if what I learned is generally known to people in the field, and even if I already knew that fact from somewhere else.  But several years down the road, if I am in graduate school and that same fact comes up, I would not be expected to go back and find my old textbook to cite from it.  At what point do I get to just know something and not have to cite it?

Many philosophers have written far more in-depth and interesting arguments about this than I could come up with, so I wanted to share two links.

http://last-straw.net/2006/06/plagiarism-and-intellectual-loot/ -is a blog that has some really interesting things to say in defense of plagiarism.  In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that the article in the blog is not original- he plagiarized it from a book called Days of War/Nights of Love, which is an uncopyrighted book that encourages people to plagiarize from it.  I couldn’t find a copy of this article on the publisher’s site, crimethinc.com but I knew I could find someone who had reprinted it online, since that is what it is for.

http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2008/02/12/fired-for-plagiarizing-plagiarism/- is a story about someone who was fired from their school paper for reprinting this same article in their college newspaper

www.jiscpas.ac.uk/documents/papers/2004Papers21.pdf – is a pdf of a well written essay that tries to refute many of the arguments made in the first article.

If you have the time, please read these articles and let me know what you think about them.  What are your opinions on plagiarism?  Is it ever ok?  How do we draw the line on what is and is not plagiarism?  Should the student have been fired for plagiarizing if the author gave permission for others to use the work?  Or did he get what he deserved for being a smart-ass?