{"id":3140,"date":"2015-03-14T20:55:22","date_gmt":"2015-03-14T20:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=3140"},"modified":"2016-08-24T05:00:37","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T05:00:37","slug":"feeding-the-beast-why-plagiarism-rips-off-readers-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/feeding-the-beast-why-plagiarism-rips-off-readers-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeding the beast: why plagiarism rips off readers too"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Stokes<\/a>, Deakin University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

By now you\u2019ve likely heard about psychiatrist and columnist Tanveer Ahmed\u2019s recent opinion piece<\/a> in The Australian in which he effectively blamed radical feminism for domestic violence.<\/p>\n

Others have explained better than I could<\/a> why Ahmed\u2019s piece was so offensive (as Clementine Ford summed it up, \u201cIt is not the job of women to absorb men\u2019s suffering<\/a>\u201d), but one seemingly tangential fact that keeps cropping up is that Ahmed is an admitted plagiarist, having been dropped by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2012 after a Media Watch story<\/a> on his habit of copying other people\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the blogger and commentator Ketan Joshi took time out from exposing the silliness of anti-wind activists<\/a> to do something no-one had apparently thought to do: check Ahmed\u2019s Australian piece for plagiarism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Using freely-available online tools, Joshi quickly established that Ahmed\u2019s piece had lifted language directly from a Prospect article by Amanda Marcotte<\/a>. Joshi also found further instances where Ahmed had recycled his own work. By day\u2019s end, the Australian had dropped Ahmed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Busting someone for plagiarism after they suggested men\u2019s violence against women is somehow feminism\u2019s fault for taking away power men were never entitled to in the first place might seem a bit like sending Al Capone up the river for tax evasion.<\/p>\n

When he was caught in 2012, Ahmed admitted his copying was wrong<\/a>, but situated what he did in the context of our contemporary \u201ccomment monster\u201d that \u201cneeds to be fed”. He has a point: in the age of churnalism<\/a>, and with the internet desperate for ever-more shareable content to throw into its mighty Clickhole<\/a>, is copying a paragraph here and there really so bad?<\/p>\n

Well, yes, actually, it is; but we need to understand why.<\/p>\n

Writers are understandably highly sensitive to plagiarism, both of having it done to them and of being accused of it. Just this month I ended up offending a journalist I admire greatly for cocking an eyebrow too publicly over her piece\u2019s resemblance to one of mine. It was a coincidence (great minds and all that) but the mere suspicion is utterly poisonous for everyone involved.<\/p>\n

For academics, it\u2019s even worse: plagiarism is among the worst of sins, and potentially one of the most catastrophic. It\u2019s not so long ago that decades-old plagiarism allegations cost a Group of Eight vice-chancellor his job<\/a>. An academic who presents the ideas of others as their own is violating the very integrity of the process by which knowledge is generated, and demeaning their fellow researchers. Understandably, we take that pretty seriously.<\/p>\n

Students too face enormous consequences for plagiarising, which in the age of essay mills<\/a> and Google is an irresistible temptation for many, Turnitin<\/a> be damned. For teachers, it\u2019s hard not to take plagiarism personally, as if the student is saying: \u201cThis stuff you\u2019ve devoted your life to? It\u2019s not important enough for me to bother even trying to care about.\u201d<\/p>\n

But plagiarism also falls on a spectrum, from outright copying (relatively rare, but occasionally spectacular<\/a>) to sloppy referencing or missing quotation marks. For every student who\u2019s tried to pull one over you, there\u2019s five more who simply haven\u2019t understood what\u2019s expected of them and hence don\u2019t realise that they\u2019ve done anything wrong.<\/p>\n

Ahmed doesn\u2019t have that excuse. He\u2019s been caught before, and he knew even back then that what he was doing was wrong. Still, you might reply, he isn\u2019t writing as an academic, but as a paid columnist. He is not presenting his work as the outcome of laborious and expensive research, nor is he submitting his work to the unforgiving gamut of peer review.<\/p>\n

Some of Ahmed\u2019s infractions are actually self-plagiarism, or recycling, which doesn\u2019t rip off another writer. Self-plagiarism is alarmingly easy to do accidentally, particularly where multiple drafts exist or one piece splits into two. Just recently I sent off two academic articles (which had begun life as a single piece) without realising I\u2019d repeated a paragraph in each; it was just dumb luck that I caught it before it got to print.<\/p>\n

So, why is Ahmed\u2019s plagiarism a sackable offence?<\/p>\n

Using the model of intellectual property we could argue that the misdeed here is selling a product that doesn\u2019t belong to him, either because it was written by someone else, or because, in the case of recycling, he had previously sold it to another publisher.<\/p>\n

In short, it\u2019s a type of theft. (That might also explain why self-plagiarism doesn\u2019t seem that bad in cases where no money has changed hands: you\u2019re repeating yourself, but not actually stealing).<\/p>\n

From the point of view of the victims \u2013 both writers and commissioning editors \u2013 the theft model makes a lot of sense. But I don\u2019t think theft alone is the whole story, because plagiarism isn\u2019t just about ownership. I\u2019ve heard stories of students angrily insisting that a ghost-written essay \u201cis my own work \u2013 I paid for it, so I own it!\u201d<\/p>\n

The effrontery of that response actually gives us some idea of why the \u201cintellectual property\u201d model of plagiarism doesn\u2019t quite yield a full understanding of what\u2019s wrong with it. Plagiarism isn\u2019t just a form of theft; it\u2019s also a form of insincerity.<\/p>\n

That may sound odd: surely the plagiarist is sincerely agreeing with what they\u2019ve copied? But sincerity is not just a matter of saying something you take to be true. The 20th-century philosopher K.E. L\u00f8gstrup<\/a> spoke of insincerity as violating an \u201copenness of speech\u201d that we reasonably assume from others: we expect that their words are \u201cnew\u201d. By \u201cnew\u201d he meant that they weren\u2019t calculated or premeditated but were spontaneous, sincere, without guile. \u201cOld\u201d words put up a barrier between speaker and hearer and thereby frustrate true dialogue.<\/p>\n

The late Robert C. Solomon<\/a>, in developing the idea of sex as a form of communication, argued that perverted sex is to sex as insincerity is to language: using language to frustrate communication by obfuscating or concealing what you really think or intend is perverting the very function of language.<\/p>\n

(That analogy took Solomon in some odd directions \u2013 at one point he says masturbation is basically talking to yourself \u2013 but the idea has something to it; faking arousal is arguably a form of insincerity that violates the communicative dimensions of intimacy.)<\/p>\n

Plagiarism, in a sense, disrupts the contact between the author and the reader. It insinuates someone else\u2019s \u201cold\u201d words between us. We come to an article wanting contact with the author\u2019s mind, not a collage of other minds they\u2019ve assembled to hide behind.<\/p>\n

Plagiarism is theft, but it is also a failure to, in E.M. Forster\u2019s phrase, \u201conly connect!\u201d The need to feed the beast shouldn\u2019t distract us from that task of connecting.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Stokes, Deakin University By now you\u2019ve likely heard about psychiatrist and columnist Tanveer Ahmed\u2019s recent opinion piece in The Australian in which he effectively blamed radical feminism for domestic violence. Others have explained better than I could why Ahmed\u2019s piece was so offensive (as Clementine Ford summed it up, \u201cIt is not the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":7120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3141,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140\/revisions\/3141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}