Most plagiarists don’t expect to get caught and, when they do, they generally go along with the demands to avoid escalation. Many will do so silently, never writing back and others will write back to apologize or make excuses. A few bold souls might even blame the infringement on a friend who gave them the work. If that happens to you, be sure to ask for the name and E-mail of the friend in question so you can contact them personally about the infringement and, if your plagiarist doesn’t provide that information, don’t buy the story, especially if they distinctly claimed the works to be their own. —Jonathan Bailey —Contacting a Plagiarist (Plagiarism Today)
I guess that since the “plagiarismtoday.com” domain was available, this author is stuck with the term “plagiarism.” But what he’s really talking about is copyright infringement. But the content on this site fills an interesting niche, in that it seems to focus on cases where one netizen pilfers the work of another. The issues I found discussed on this site involved self-published poetry and blog discussions, rather than professional content.
If I reproduce something that somebody else wrote, and I give the original author credit, it’s not plagiarism, even though it may still be copyright infringement.
It’s not plagiarism unless you pass off somebody else’s work (e.g. words, ideas, or complex structure) as your own.
Good point, Mike. A comprehensive understanding of copyright and plagiarism includes an understanding of sampling, collage, remixing, and parody.
And a comprehensive understanding of academic dishonesty (something I didn’t attempt in this post) will recognize other problems besides plagiarism.
I’ll check out Becky next.
Becky at Schenectady Synecdoche has had some smart stuff to say about this guy. I’m interested in your last sentence, though, because it points out to me how policies around plagiarism get blurred in academia: the key phrase I see you using is “somebody else’s work,” and the UMass policy — like many other plagiarism policies, themselves often ‘plagiarized’ — also describes penalties for (1) re-using one’s own work without acknowledgement, like turning in one paper for several different classes in one’s academic career, and for (2) the person who gives away the work to be passed off as the plagiarizer’s own.
Both fit under the category of “academic dishonesty,” but that category also includes writing the test answers on your wrist, bringing a calculator to an exam, and looking over the shoulder of the person in front of you to bubble in the same answers on your scan-tron sheet, and so strikes me as too loose to be useful.
I’d like to have a value-neutral term that describes literate textual proliferation in ways that allows for understandings of plagiarism and copyright infringement but that also allows for derivative slash fiction and giving away one’s poetry for remixing.