Re: Unreferenced Notes from an Instructor

On Tue, 10 May 2005, Meghann Matwichuk <mtwchk[_at_]UDel.Edu> wrote:
>
> .... I don't want to get into trouble and more
> important, I don't want to encourage plagiarism in any form. ...

Others have covered the aspect of copyright. Here, I will talk a bit about the plagiarism. It seems that your instructor is going to regret too much.

The rules against plagiarism are invented by ivory tower to protect and perpetuate the mythical, romantic concept of authorship. If your instructor believes strongly against plagiarism, she is partially responsible for teaching her students the myth of authorship, instead of teaching them that we are part of ecosystem of knowledge.

Your instructor relies on a dangerous assumption that T.R. Reid is not a plagiarist. Your instructor may appeal to "innocent until proven otherwise" rationale to escape the responsibility to prove that T.R. Reid is not a plagiarist. Moreover, your instructor also relies on a dangerous assumption that the sources that T.R. Reid relied on are also not plagiarists. This is like telling her students that it is okay to assume that everyone other than a student himself is not a plagiarist where in reality, everyone is a plagiarist in some way (just look at all the novelists).

There are two forms of plagiarism that your instructor is confusing with copyright. Plagiarism due to copying text without giving attribution may or may not be a violation of copyright law depending on the four factors of fair use and Merger Doctrine. Plagiarism due to copying ideas without giving attribution is never a violation of copyright law, for authors and artists do not own ideas in their works although some of them like to make false claim on them.

Certainly, the ideas in this post are not from me. I learned them from someone somewhere sometime in the past. From the eye of ivory tower, I am definitely a plagiarist for I do not give any attribution for the ideas that I copied. From the eye of copyright law, I ain't an infringer.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 4,978

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Tue May 17 2005 - 01:39:59 GMT