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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

What strikes me from the examples in the OP is that this method of plagiarism doesn’t seem very easy. How would you produce this kind of thing? Eg maybe you read a lot and collect a large number of flowery phrases to use over time or maybe you just pinch phrases you like from whatever you read today. I guess I usually associate plagiarism with less effort than seems to have been required here.

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It’s a collage of flowery phrases taken from here and there. I don’t think it’s plagiarism, because it involves copying larger chunks than a convenient paragraph.

Originality is the art of hiding your sources, which has become utterly impossible nowadays with the search engines.

If he had studied after the 2010s, he would have paraphrased a bit more to confuse google

When I was in high school/university, they taught us that plagarism was taking even ideas and reusing them directly. Copying a sentence like that was an explicit example, even if generic. We were told that it gets suspicious at even 4 more complex words that are the same.

Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism.

Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.

> Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism.

As a high school student, this is still true. People literally get suspended/expelled for plagiarism.

Plagiarism is a lack of citing sources. If you haven’t published your school work, you cannot cite yourself. Or can you

I know that definition of plagiarism exists in schools (how broadly I couldn't say) but it's completely incoherent and unused in any other context.

Outside of academic contexts, the concept of plagiarism in itself doesn't make a lot of sense or have much meaning until it reaches what would otherwise be copyright infringement or involves trade secrets/non-disclosure agreements.

Nobody would care in a business meeting if you copied a random graph without citation or included data in a pitch deck. Reusing a presentation or publishing an article several times in trade publications with a bit of tweaking is pretty normal.

The underlying concept is using other people's ideas as your own. It's coherent and there's good reason for using it in academia, and probably also in journalism and creative writing.

> other people's ideas

How does ownership of ideas work again? And I don't mean citing sources when required, but the tracking and commodification of roots of experience external to existence in understanding.

You've got to be trained in mental gymnastics to jump through those logical hoops.

You don't need mental gymnastics, and you don't need to believe that people can own ideas or that they should be commodified (though it's fine if you do). You just need to understand that people deserve credit for the ideas they came up with. This is particularly important for academics, who live or die by their ideas.

The piece that is incoherent is the self plagiarism. If it were just the reasonable bit you mention then there'd be no point in calling it out :)

I’ve heard that about self-plagiarism and I think it’s idiotic. You should be able to reuse your own sentences or ideas.

Specially ideas. Which cannot be copyrighted (yet).

Somebody show cage Michael Tomasello right now. Open any of his books and you’ll see a series of self-plagiarism sentences.

I now think he’s just a genius because he’s investigated his field in depth

Nobody says you can't - you just need to cite the source, your previous work.

Yeah I think the recent conservative witch hunts on liberal academics in American may have set this off as a weak point to attack of those who have more academic degrees. I assume the opposite will take off eventually as well.

I assume it is a combo of schools wanting to extract more original output and wanting to know precisely where an idea originated/was originally published, i.e. which paper.

But happily it is not a concept outside academia.

I don't know. When I give a presentation I try to credit people for major ideas or other contributions. If I didn't it probably wouldn't be taken nearly as seriously as in an academic context but it's still a good practice.

It depends on the context.

Schools may have codes of conduct that implicitly or explicitly prohibit turning in the same paper for multiple classes. A publishing contract may specify that an article is original.

As others have mentioned though reusing both your own and other product descriptions, explainers, slides/data, etc. especially within a single company is pretty normal and accepted.

Self-plagiarism is not the same as stealing someone else's ideas, but it is still ethically wrong if you are e.g. selling an academic article to one publisher, when it is really just an already published article of yours with the title changed.

The more interesting question is whether he lifted entire plots from other books or just used the collage-of-website-text to fill specific details

This just looks like a sloppy writer saving time on understanding typical California mansion layouts and features or how snipers set up or British music in the 1990s or what Juarez is like by minimally revising the first Google result he found to generate the descriptive passage. But how a sniper sets up might not be the only bit he's taken from a book about a sniper, and a couple of evocative bits of description in a parody article not the only bits he's taken from Bond.

Yeah, I think that’s a more relevant question to the whole plagiarism thing. It may be that it’s just easier to show little sentences in the Reddit post.

I guess it's also easier to argue an author serendipitously ended up with the same trope-heavy story beats as Live and Let Die or Dr No in their spy thriller than it is to argue they serendipitously ended up with references to "the harlequinade of youth" and "fur-skinned Afghans" in a street scene. But the former is even lazier writing

Understandably, many people are worried about the cheapening of their trades. Why go through the effort when you don't have to to meet a sniper and interview them for their training and experiences, or consult the world's foremost expert on niche period architecture (how we met? oh, it's quite a story) when you have the internet?

The thorn is that evidence of effective literature doesn't exist as an objective truth, but it often looks like sales. Writers who spend their careers being honest, thoughtful, and meticulous don't publish 20 books in two years, and they often don't make as much money as the Mark Dawsons. The business of being someone who manufactures and sells works of fiction in today's world is not radically different than ever in history, and it signals not the collapse, but the return of writing under our new publication and distribution models.

Pulps are not new, like light novels, themed writing periodicals, or any other historical light published media. They took a break for about 20 years as things moved online, and they've experienced a resurgence as web serials, ebooks, and KPD partners. I'm not surprised or offended by any of that, or the Mark Dawsons, even if I have no interest in their products. But then again, I'm not vested in the old models and afraid of disruption.

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