Plagiarism
I wrote a couple of years ago that if you couldn't find something of interest at Arts and Letters Daily you had your monitor turned off. Nothing has changed, it is still a source of links to wonderful things.
Something Borrowed
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?
I believe the penalties levied for crime in this country, both those administered by the state and those extrajudicial ones meted out by society, are generally too harsh. Having said that, I have very little sympathy for the plagiarists. I read this article and like the victim I was outraged and ready to nail the miscreant, but by the end it was not so clear. It was not clear at all what was fair and what was just. This article is fairly long but certainly worth your time.
Further reading Lawrence Lessig
Comments
What a very interesting article. It made complete sense to me that Lavery would consider Gladwell's article to be a valid source of 'news' in her quest for accuracy in writing her play. And while I sympathized with Lewis' feeling of having been violated, the charge of plagiarism seemed to be a consequence of the shift in emphasis from the rights of the commons to the rights of private property.
Posted by: alison | November 28, 2004 10:31 PM | Reply to this comment
With the advent of digitization, I think intellectual property protection becomes pretty thorny. Suppose I write some software that I think I 'own' and want to profit from. Well, what is a program, exactly? It is nothing more than a single, finite integer. It's a number. Microsoft Word is just a number. Sure, it probably has a lot of digits, but it's still just a number. But that number, properly interpreted by the computer, describes exactly what the program does. Suppose my software ends up being the number 42. Everybody who has the number 42 on their computer has my property. Does that make any sense? Not to me. The article has the following quote: "But just the four pitches, G, G, G, E-flat? Nobody owns those." Can anyone be said to own an integer? The idea is appalling to me.
The same argument can be made with digital music. Metallica's "Unforgiven" mp3 on my computer here is simply a number that's perhaps 1.5 million digits long. If I wrote a song that could be represented by the one digit number '0' could I then sue everyone who owns a digital device?
Posted by: Mike Jensen | December 1, 2004 9:14 AM | Reply to this comment