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Comment by Erratic6576 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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