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Comment by mjw1007 | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the problem here is that universities have repurposed the word "plagiarism" to include forms of cheating which it doesn't naturally cover.

For example, if a student pays someone else to write an essay, nowadays that gets classified as plagiarism. But it's hard to see it as a theft of ideas, any more than it's theft if I buy something from a shop.

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Plagiarism is to misrepresent something as authored by yourself. Whether you paid someone else for writing it or copied it without permission does not matter for the plagiarism charge - the wrongdoing is the misrepresentation.

It is not the same as copyright infringement - although it might be both at the same time if you copy something without permission and publish it under your own name.

Plagiarism is not always illegal. Publishing a book which is ghostwritten by someone else is not illegal AFAIK (as long as they get paid). But in education and research it is illegal - and they don't care if you bought the material fairly, the point is that decisions (grades, hiring, funding etc.) are based on the assumption that the material reflects your abilities.

So it is not really "theft of ideas", it is "faking credentials".

One of the issues that makes this murkier is that it is often only social norms and expectations that determine whether someone is misrepresenting themselves. In the meme world, the whole purpose is to share and modify slightly. There isn't an expectation that your post is original. In the academic world, every single word is assumed to be original unless cited otherwise. There are areas in between these cases, and often what someone calls a violation is merely the case of someone misreading the social norms.

I agree fully. I left academia because of exactly this reason.

While academics have high morale on not stealing more than four words in the same sequence, they don't have any issue putting their names first on some engineers idea.

There are more than just two parties to plagiarism. In the example given, the student buying an essay has not wronged the student who wrote the essay, anymore than a politician has wronged their speechwriter. However, when they turn in that essay for credit in a class, they have wronged the university by fraudulently representing it as theirs. The cost of the degree is in work that they have personally completed, not work that they have subcontracted out. This is the reputation that has been stolen, that has been inappropriately assigned to the plagiarist.

Where I would agree with your general statement is the concept of "self-plagiarism", typically defined as submitting the same work for credit in multiple forums. Plagiarism requires a third party whose work is being passed off, and self-plagiarism is an oxymoron.

Certainly the student has wronged the university, but to my mind it's the same kind of wrong as if they'd smuggled a calculator in to an arithmetic test. That also lets the student gain a reputation they didn't deserve.

I would prefer to reserve "plagiarism" for the case where the true originator of the ideas is potentially being eclipsed.

(Incidentally, according to my local university's academic misconduct policy, if the vice-chancellor uses a speechwriter without crediting them they are indeed a plagiarist. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me, though I suspect it may not be enforced, but I would prefer to use a different term.)

Would it be better to deprecate the world plagiarism and fork it into the words cheating and reputation stealing? To me, that would ultimately be more accurate, because it better encapsulates the harm involved.

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