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5 may 2006

Plagiarism really isn't the same thing as copyright infringement, although a partricular case might be both things at once. If I publish a pirate edition of a book by William Bronk, that is infringement, but not plagiarism. If I publish as poem as my own, that Bronk really wrote, that is plagiarism and infringement as well. If I plagiarize something whose copyright has expired, that is still plagiarism even if nobody has standing to sue me for it. If I plagiarize a few lines, but not anything lengthy or significant enough to be sued over, that is still plagiarism. If I read an article in the PMLA and write my own article, with the same ideas but completely different words, that is plagiarism, but have I infringed copyright?

If I cite something in a footnote, with proper attribution, that is not plagiarism; but if it is a complete, self-contained poem then I might need permission not to infringe on a copyright, according to some interpretations of the law.

Infringement is reproducing a text without permission, in a way that damages the interests of someone who owns that text.
Plagiarism is misrepresenting the authorship of ideas, phrases, sentences. It's easy to see why these two concepts are confused.

3 comentarios:

  1. The bottom line: the idea of the integrity of the work as piece of writing is devalued. It's easier for a ghost-writer to plagiarize, because that person has less invested in the integrity of his or her word/work.

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  2. Well, if the book says "as told to..." then that makes it a little different. Even celebrity memoirs that don't say "as told to" are assumed to be written by ghost writers. At what point does that become simply a convention that doesn't even need to be acknowledged? We just assume that someone else wrote the book unless there's some reason to believe otherwise.

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  3. Did the books say "as told to Bob Basil"?

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