Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Plagiarism

Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has written a provocative and endlessly interesting article, this time on the subject of plagiarism. A quote:
When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to "match" a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else's idea. But had we "matched" any of the Times' words -- even the most banal of phrases -- it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Plagiarism is an merely an academic transgression.

Copyright infringement is something else again.

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.

9:27 AM  

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