Is Plagiarism Wrong?

Intentionally copying the work of someone else, letter by letter, with the goal of getting some kind of reward, can be seen as morally wrong.

But from there down you have a lot of shades of gray, can seven musical notes be taken as plagiarism if you do a different song with a sucession of notes that you didn't know from where they came (for you may be indistingishable from your own creation), or that you never heard before? Or a full phrase, in a different context, or a "common sense" algorythm to solve a common problem with not so many ways to solve it?

When you are not doing a full copy, at some point you reach the level of meme transmission, something that makes us humans, enabled the emergence of civilization and let us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or worse, with just independent, but similar enough, work, putting laws penalizing that turns creation into a potential trap for whoever that doesn't have an army of lawyers already.

Plagiarism has more of a claim to being morally wrong than copyright violation, I would say. The notion of copyright only arose a few centuries ago, and even today a significant part of the world doesn’t really get the concept deep down. But when it comes to plagiarism, we have attestations even from antiquity (Martial, for instance) of creators complaining about their work being passed off as that of someone else.

Here's a thought: What if there is a one or two categories missing from attributing or not attributing?

For a piece of work you could have:

1) Attributes the sources of works that comprise it. Honest, cannot think of a situation that it is inappropriate for people not bound by national security considerations and the like.

2) Does not attribute but explicitly states that they did not write it. Honest, but better to attribute. Not appropriate for anywhere the author needs to demonstrate their skill, such as academia. Not appropriate for things that explicitly or implicitly require attribution.

3) Does not attribute but it is implicit they didn't create it themselves. Limited applicability to things that the original author doesn't mind people spreading. Sharing jokes, memes and political slogans are obvious uses of this.

4) Doesn't attribute author and implicitly or explicitly gives the impression they were the original author. Traditional plagiarism. Utterly dishonest.

The usefulness of having these two extra categories (2 and 3) are that they differentiate between honest and dishonest people and that authors may want to release their works under a license that says they cannot claim they wrote the work themselves, thereby reducing the burden of future distributors of altered works having to include an ever-growing list of attributions as derived works move from person to person.

I can understand a 6 year old being confused. They (maybe) aren't old enough to grasp that actually composing something like a poem is the hard part. At that age, memorizing and writing it down can seem like an impressive feat all by itself, possibly even more impressive than the composing part. All the more true for a kid under the circumstances described (challenges with English due to immigrating, etc).

With an adult, though...I'd think they'd understand the concept of taking credit for someone else's work being not ok.

I'm not fan of the way intellectual property law works (in particular the way it is shoehorned into a free market system which only works efficiently on scarce goods with non-zero marginal cost, which IP is not), but still. This isn't really about intellectual property per se. It's still wrong to claim you came up with things for which the copyright is long expired or never existed. It is dishonest, and it is cheating.

This article presents an interesting childhood misunderstanding, and a misunderstanding by adults of how a child might think (I tend to think the teacher was rather cruel), and then spins it as if the child's point of view is sophisticated enough to be a valid adult view. But it obviously isn't.

The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net

Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of examples that I've found with basic automated searching just in matches to my own personal code). I have found some seriously absurd examples where an entire portfolio consists of my code, and the person got a job from it at a large company.

Compare a student who writes their own code to the student who plagiarizes.

If you're the non-copy-pasta student, you're competing with the fakes for jobs.

If you're an employer, you're tasked with figuring out who is who, and I strongly doubt you would personally want the copy-paster at your business for both legal and productivity reasons.

I think some people confuse plagiarism and innovation, especially when we start to wrap in "intellectual property" into it.

Plagiarism is a shortcut used to fake skills/credentials.

Innovation is a real skill, though could be debated I am sure.

Intellectual property value is up for debate.

People who are cheating/faking their way, lying about their value/skills harms both employers and students.

Just don't let people debating about plagiarism try to sneak in innovation/building-upon as a means of a straw man.

We're talking copy and paste here. Maybe some synonym swaps.

"Give with an open hand, and stop thinking about the tokens with which you will be repaid. Be happy to be worth stealing from. The future owes you nothing."

I see ideas like this regularly on HN, yet when it comes to the GNU/GPL, violators are regularly excoriated. If you don't care about plagiarism, you shouldn't care about a company making money on code you decided to give out for free.

My point is that people that write these articles quickly change their mind when the plagiarism enriches someone they don't like, disagree with politically, or just don't feel deserves to profit off of it.

Sounds like a bad apology from someone who got caught passing of others work as their own. Yes plagiarism is wrong, and no it’s not the entirety of academia that is wrong because you can’t get by without talent through just copying other people’s work.

Yes, plagiarism is wrong.

The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird.

The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals, rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.

The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas, but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation, subverting this heuristic.

The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads. In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano Formula.

In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept is severely flawed.

Yes, plagiarism is wrong.

The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird.

The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals, rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.

The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas, but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation, subverting this heuristic.

The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads. In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano Formula.

In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept is severely flawed.

> “ American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were jealous that you could do it.”

Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?

Plagiarism is a fancy word but cheating is something that kids by that age should understand.

Also that’s a pretty darn nasty and entitled attitude from an immigrant family, who should have been grateful for the country which received them.

> I have a simple recommendation for you: do a half-decent job teaching undergraduates.

Part of teaching well is sending the message that cheating is not tolerated. It is demoralizing and stressful for honest, hard working students to see others cheat and blow the curve.

> There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is inscribed.

Pardon the snarkiness, but there doesn’t seem to have been a moral foundation put down in the case of this author. Yes, if parents and educators don’t build and reinforce that foundation, then there won’t be any.

"Similarly, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a system in which we stop crediting the original source of the idea—one would just need to find a way to make it practicable. There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is inscribed."

I think that's the main point of the article, and I agree that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The problem is just that this can lead to other problems. One of them is lying; if you say that you made something you didn't, you are lying. Another one is that you can get rewarded for something you didn't make; it could be e.g. money or a job.

So in order to make it practicable we would have to find a way to either avoid all those other problems, or to make the change so small that we don't get those problems but in that case I don't know if there would practically be any difference.

> It is true that I did not know about “intellectual property,” but even if I had, that would not have helped. . . But what if I want to go around quoting Hamlet and claiming the words as my own? In that case, there’s no issue of depriving Shakespeare or his immediate descendants of the money that is rightfully theirs. It is at that point that plagiarism norms kick in.

The author seems to think that copyright is just about economic rights, but in reality it also confers moral rights.

For example, the Berne convention states: "independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work".

You cannot justify violating the right to attribution/recognition of authorship on the grounds that it does not cause any financial loss to the author - they are independent rights.

Yes, obviously IMO. Surprised I haven’t seen it mentioned here yet but the chief reason plagiarism is wrong in my view is that it’s typically employed in situations in which the finished work is used to “certify” the ability to prepare the finished work. By “stealing” that finished work, the plagiarizer is granted credentials that they don’t deserve, thereby rotting their given institution from within by being granted prestige without the expected concomitant skill to match. It’s institutional poison IMO

This feels like another data point indicating that Internet youths are flirting with a total rewrite of what’s right and wrong. It’s absurd.

One place where I think most people don't mind a little plagiarism is in joke telling. I can't tell you how many Dad Jokes I've found on the Internet and passed off as my own, and I think there's sort of an understanding that if you read a joke off a Laffy Taffy wrapper, you now get to tell that joke to others without attribution.

That said, in the professional comedy world, there's the idea of joke theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft and I think most people recognize that as more clearly an example of cheating.

"Is Plagiarism Wrong? by Agnes Callard"

Why did the author write his name in the article if the argument is that attributing any kind of ownership or provenance is without value? It's almost as if the author cares about his original work.

> outrage against plagiarists is about protecting idea-creators, not readers.

The author states this, but then says nothing to elaborate on their claim or justify it. As a "user" of academic writings, it is extremely annoying to come across stuff that's not referenced properly, has been gratuitously-reinvented in a way that fractures the lit on some topic, etc. It's bad enough when these things happen casually or by mistake, imagine if people actually started doing it on purpose, merely to claim credit on others' achievements. Treating this as a "moral" crusade of sorts seems to be totally justified.

Interesting that a philosophy column on an ethical issue talks a lot about legality in the first half. I guess it speaks to an optimistic attitude about the role of law.

I love this bit in the references:

"1. Any resemblances between this essay and Brian L. Frye’s forthcoming article “Plagiarize This Paper” (IDEA: The IP Law Review https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3462144) are probably due to the fact that I plagiarized it in several places."

Incidentally, these auto-plagiarism-detection systems that academic journals use seem to go overboard. You 're not allowed to quote yourself, and sometimes they detect completely silly things. It's just not possible not to plagiarize "serial section electron tomography".

Yes. You need to give credits where it's due.

Another annoying thing is that university plagiarism policies seem to have been largely written by humanities departments without thinking very hard about the needs of others.

Taken literally, my local university's plagiarism policy says it would be "academic misconduct" for a mathematics undergraduate to reproduce a known proof of a theorem in an examination without identifying a source. Unless things have changed greatly, this is not in fact expected of them.

Lets copy this article under my domain name, attribute it to me and link to it on hackernews. Plagiarism withdraws many incentives to create (not only financial) and is therefore morally wrong. Copying memes is good since it allows confrontation and emergence of best memes. But you also need incentives to create, being money (sensible copyright) or fame (attibution)

I think the author is making a good point here, though overstating the case. Remember, plagiarism in academia isn’t just stealing an entire paper and claiming it’s yours. In my narrow sub field, probably the first three sentences of every paper’s introduction could be identical, but if I copied those from another paper that’s plagiarism. Likewise, if my paper built on a useful equation from another’s work, and I copied the explanation directly from that paper, it’s plagiarism. Yet as the author said, this does little disservice to the reader. These rules are more about properly maintaining an academic measure of merit.

But while this is a great point, we shouldn’t abandon the problem of plagiarism all together. Instead, just start with your moral system, say utilitarian or a Kantian ethic, and then put it to the test. For certain, some systems will find it intrinsically immortal regardless of the social context.

I wonder if the story about memorizing Shel Silverstein’s poem is true or if the author stole that too

Good artists copy, great artists steal ~ Picasso (remarked by Jobs).

Yes.

I teach college and often public speaking. Practically all college students know that wholesale plagiarism is wrong but many of them still don't know how to cite their sources.

I tell them any time you use information from another source you need to say the source even if you use the same source 2-3 sentences in a row. Every time I hear you give a statistic I ask myself, "Did you give a source for that?" We do exercises where I give them paragraphs without citations and ask them to identify all the ones that need citations. I have them do impromptu speeches on summarizing an article and citing it multiple times. I explain the difference between a source and a citation. I tell them I don't care about a works cited slide. If I don't hear them say the source it doesn't count.

Many of them still give statistics without citing them.