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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 :)

> 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.

> 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’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

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.

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.

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

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.

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