story on plagarism

Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2007 Information Today, Inc.

Ohio University, the oldest public university in the state of Ohio, is an institution with an enrollment of about 20,000 students. For the past year, the university has been besieged by a crippling plagiarism scandal. Based on an alumnus’ allegations that more than 30 students in the school’s mechanical engineering department have plagiarized substantial or core portions of their graduate theses, the Athens, Ohio, institution has ordered those students to address the allegations or risk having their degrees revoked. Some of these theses are 20 years old, according to an article about the case in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Aug. 15, 2006.

This front-page story was the latest in a series of plagiarism stories that seem to be destined for headline news. According to a WSJ article published on May 14, 2006, the board of directors at defense contractor Raytheon Co. decided it would withhold a salary increase and reduce incentive stock compensation to CEO William Swanson after it was revealed that Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management, a booklet he authored, contained almost verbatim passages from The Unwritten Rules of Engineering, a 1944 book by W. J. King.

A few weeks earlier, publisher Little, Brown and Co. took the extraordinary step of removing the novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life from retail shelves after The Harvard Crimson published a story accusing author Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard undergraduate student, of pilfering significant portions of two teen novels written by Megan McCafferty, according to a WSJ article published on April 28.

Based on these developments, plagiarism has become the new piracy. Just as piracy was a few years ago, plagiarism has become the hot, new crime du jour–an act that suggests immorality and often scandal at once. What’s more, plagiarism allegations feed into our society’s Candid Camera mentality–our seemingly insatiable need to uncover wrongdoing. So that’s why I wanted to compare plagiarism and copyright, and to write about the role of information professionals in raising the collective level of citation savvy.

Copyright [not equal to] Plagiarism

One of the biggest misconceptions about plagiarism is that it is synonymous with copyright infringement. Each passing year, I spend more time during my copyright seminar at Syracuse University explaining the distinction between (and possible intersecting points of) copyright and plagiarism.

Here’s how I compare and contrast these two concepts: Copyright simply is a set of laws that governs the creation, reproduction, and distribution of original works that can be perceived. Copyright law is codified as a federal statute at Title 17 of U.S. Code. The most important things to remember about copyright are that 1) it is a set of laws and 2) allegations of wrongdoing–the illegal use of protected works without exception, license, or purchase–are made within the context of a standardized legal process. But more about this process later.

Plagiarism, in comparison, is the act of stealing and passing off someone else’s ideas or words as one’s own without crediting the source, as defined in Merriam-Webster Online. Brief or attributed quotes generally do not constitute plagiarism. Typically, no law governs plagiarism, so no one can be sued for plagiarism. Ultimately, plagiarism is about idea theft: A person tries to take an idea and claim it as his or her own.

There is also a potential intersection between plagiarism and copyright. For example, an idea can be plagiarized, but an idea cannot be copyrighted. However, if that idea is committed to paper (or otherwise recorded), then the idea can be both plagiarized and infringed. So let’s take this a step further: While a recorded idea can be subject to plagiarism and copyright infringement, a person could use a recorded idea if that use falls under one or more copyright exceptions. Qualifying for one of the exceptions may remove the copyright infringement risk, but it may not necessarily remove the plagiarism risk.

In fact, a person who adds some level of ironic twist to the use may be considered a parodist and make that parody his own new, unique work that is subject to its own copyright protection. Or, given our working definition of plagiarism–the act of stealing and passing off another’s ideas or words as one’s own without crediting the source–one could reasonably argue that the act of parody constitutes a form of plagiarism. In many parodies, the source of the parody is instantly recognized, but does instant recognition equate to attribution?

In the end, though, copyright infringement and plagiarism are distinct and separate. But it is easier now to recognize how these concepts can get twisted.

Plagiarism Allegations

Even though copyright infringement can result in financial damages or even jail time, plagiarism allegations can be much more damaging to a person’s professional reputation than allegations of copyright infringement. To support this statement, let’s return to the Copyright Act. The act operates in a way that excuses infringement allegations. For example, fair use under Section 107 excuses an allegation of copyright infringement. Practically speaking, a judge may look at the facts of a case and determine that a party has actually made fair use of a work. Alternatively, a judge could determine that an accused’s claim of a fair use excuse is errant. (The publishing industry has been making just such an argument in its lawsuit over Google Book Search.) But in the end, copyright law allows for the possibility that allegedly illegal conduct may be excusable or defensible.

Federal copyright law (along with federal rules of evidence and civil litigation procedure) also typically places certain burdens on the accuser, including the burden of proving that an infringement occurred and that the accused is the party responsible for the infringement. Copyright law also imposes prerequisites that must be met even before an accuser makes an allegation: Pursuant to Section 411, a copyright owner cannot start a copyright infringement lawsuit unless the work at issue is registered with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. Given the excuses available to the accused, the procedural safeguards, and evidentiary safeguards, it is easy to see how the copyright system tries to balance the rights and reputations of the accused and the accuser.

Plagiarism allegations, however, have no such safeguards. Allegations of plagiarism do not require registration, and they do not require that the accuser prove the allegation. Plagiarism allegations do not even require that the injured party be the one who alleges wrongdoing. In most cases, third parties identify potential acts of plagiarism, make public allegations, then let the public rumor mill consider the facts. The accuser is never called upon to account for the veracity or falsity of his claim.

Plagiarism cases may involve an accuser’s questionable motives. For example, the person alleging plagiarism in the Ohio University case is an alumnus who was initially unable to get his thesis topic approved, according to the WSJ article. The article fails to ask (or answer) what seems to be an obvious question: Did the accuser have a big enough grudge against the students who graduated before him to discredit their work? While no proof exists that the accuser in the Ohio University scandal was fueled by such a motive, it is still a legitimate question.

Further, the WSJ report does not identify any conclusive determination that any of the alleged plagiarizers intentionally used another person’s content with the intent to deceive the reader that such content (or the ideas therein) was original. The story includes reports that seem worth investigating, but it seems the burden now lies with the accused to prove the claim effectively: They did not plagiarize. That is a tough position to be in.

What’s more, plagiarism claims inherently presume that the accused has a guilty mind: The alleged plagiarist intentionally and knowingly copied and failed to attribute another person’s work. But in many well-known plagiarism cases, the accused deny any intent to fail to attribute. Some say it is industrial sloppiness. This may or may not be true, but if industrial sloppiness–not stealth–is the real reason for not attributing something, then that seems different than an instance where a person’s mens rea is such that he meant to cheat. Certainly, the former does not seem to warrant destruction of the accused’s professional reputation.

(As an aside, an issue that seems to be lost within these discussions is the failure of educational institutions–domestic and international, at all levels–to train students properly for the rigors of high-level academic work, including technical writing and citation. That subject should be addressed elsewhere.)

The lack of standards in plagiarism cases make an accusation virtually impossible to defend, but the mere allegation of plagiarism is considered an often irreversible smudge against a person’s professional and personal values and ethics. This modern version of the scarlet letter points to one of the biggest problems with plagiarism: Without any clear standard, no burden of proof, and virtually no defenses, mere accusations of plagiarism can crush reputations faster than any allegation of copyright infringement.

Potential Plagiarism Solutions

This plagiarism controversy will not end any time soon. Interestingly, information professionals can play a role in helping knowledge workers with academic and technical writing. From a reference standpoint, several academic and corporate libraries will have subject matter specialists to help sift through and manage the literature on a given topic. The best librarians also will be quite familiar with standard citation conventions in that literature, and perhaps even will have available citation style guides that distill citation intricacies into manageable and repeatable steps.

Some libraries are even going further by providing access to Web-based citation management software. These service offerings are consistent with the contemporary trend of moving applications off the desktop, and instead, leveraging the Web as a computing platform. The benefit to packages such as RefWorks (www.refworks.com) is that the citations are centrally located and organized, and accessible from a reliable Web connection. Many of these packages also interface both with online databases and with Voyager-based library systems. This integration lets you drop citations right into the software from articles and catalog records.

Plagiarism accusations can dog and derail professional careers, even of those who have made legitimate or honest errors. The best way to stay out of plagiarism’s bright, unflattering spotlight is to identify citation customs (these will differ according to industry), learn those customs and citation standards, and, where possible, seek training or assistance in mastering and applying those standards.

K. Matthew Dames is the executive editor of Copycense (www.copycense.com), an online publication that reports on the law, business, and technology of digital content. He also frequently speaks to librarians about intellectual property issues, and he teaches copyright and licensing at Syracuse University’s iSchool. He has an M.S.L.I.S. from Syracuse University in New York and a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. His email address is copycense@gmail.com.