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The economics of plagiarism
The economics of plagiarism are changing:
1. Plagiarism is now easier to catch and publicize, mostly because of the Web, Google, and computer search programs.
2. We are exposed to more influences, whether consciously or not, than before.
3. "Cut and paste," and other technologies, make cheating and plagiarism easier.
4. Borrowing from others will become more common but also more acknowledged and transparent, if only to avoid punishment preemptively.
5. The younger generation is less taken aback by the idea of plagiarism. Perhaps rap music and sampling are an influence, not to mention mash-ups and digitally altered photos.
6. The notion of "originality" has become murkier.
7. Editors and portals will be seen increasingly as sources of originality. What percentage of your favorite blogs are produced by "Control C"?
8. Plagiarism is least just when an idea is stolen before the creator can bring it to the public. That said, some of these forms of plagiarism are efficient, if not always fair. We can expect the "good executors" to steal from the "idea people"; not all of the latter can execute well, nor are they typically good at selling their ideas to the executors.
Michael at 2blowhards.com has further commentary. I owe these points to a conversation with Tim Harford (ah, but how much of this was his?), who covers the topic in today's Financial Times.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 5, 2006 at 06:36 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
These kids to day with their rap music. With the hippin' and the hoppin' and the bippin' and the boppin'. Get a haircut!
Posted by: joshg at May 5, 2006 8:14:42 AM
Blame it on file-sharing and the accessibility of free information. There's a part of me that strongly believes "information wants to be free," and tying it up with endless footnotes and references is really a barrier to information flow, when you get down to it. I think the Internet really lowers the barrier for when an idea becomes "common knowledge" and no longer requires citation. One thing that really upset my professors in precept back in school, was that I often didn't remember where I'd heard of an idea. I'd read it, but for the life of me I couldn't remember who said it -- just what I thought about the idea and the situations they sprang from.
Posted by: Mycroft at May 5, 2006 9:07:22 AM
Yes but what about plagurists like talk radio host Michael Savage, who stole the title of his book, "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder," from The Great Frank from Queens?
In this clip, John of Staten Island and Sheryl from New Jersey show through archive phone calls that Frank used a variation of the phrase on several phone calls to WABC back in the early 1990's. At the time, Michael Savage was living in New York, and listening to a lot of talk radio.
Coincidence?
Download the mp3 and hear for yourself!
http://rapidshare.de/files/19370624/trp2006.04.28-Savage-rips-off-Frank.mp3.html
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Posted by: Peter Goodman at May 5, 2006 10:27:25 AM
It makes sense that the younger generation will always be "less taken aback" by plagiarism.
Generally, the youngsters are the ones doing the copying because the older generation has done all the work. Kids have mindless term-papers to hand in; older people have already done the leg work.
The grasshopper is always less taken aback by laziness than the ant.
Posted by: Collin at May 5, 2006 11:42:09 AM
in light of all the copying & pasting, maybe the time for transclusion has arrived:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion
and more accurate posting times so that we can see who posted to their blog with a new idea milliseconds before someone else ;)
Posted by: Gregor J. Rothfuss at May 5, 2006 12:17:53 PM
Correct citation will become more, not less, important for truly valuable and unique ideas, and the value of people with unusual ideas will go up.
Citation and plagiarism will become irrelevant for ideas that just aren't that great anyway (such as the "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" title above"). Political cheapshots are already worthless and are generally recognized as such.
The big losers, BTW, are the students who plagiarize, who have always and will always be shortchanging their own education. If you want to stop student plagiarism, just make the students pay their own tuition. No one will pay for feedback on someone else's essays.
Posted by: DK at May 5, 2006 12:41:09 PM
I found this list to be of great interest. Thanks...
Posted by: Steve Myers at May 5, 2006 1:34:40 PM
But if you crib from three or more sources, it's called research, right?
Posted by: Bill Conerly at May 5, 2006 1:40:45 PM
I think Michael Savage might have more explicitly copied the name of his book.
If you look at the link...
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb102004.shtml
In recent times many have tried to explicitly classify conservatism as a mental disorder
Posted by: lannychiu at May 5, 2006 1:42:24 PM
I have to agree that borrowing is becoming more commonplace. Blogging has contributed to that, but it has also contributed to the greater tendency to acknowledge the source by explicitly quoting and linking to it.
Posted by: Dale at May 5, 2006 3:07:02 PM
Speaking again as a journal editor, I can say that allegations of
plagiarism are one of the more difficult and unpleasant matters with
which we must contend. Sometimes it is clear cut. However, increasingly
the plagiarists are getting trickier, altering wording and so forth to
cover their tracks. It is not always so easy to convict the guilty.
This can get very frustrating, especially for the plagiarizess, if I
have not just concocted a neologism (go ahead, plagiarize it!).
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 5, 2006 3:24:21 PM
What's the evidence that point 5 applies to the field where plagiarism originated and where violating the norm against it is seen as being of greater importance than others, text written for the purpose of being read (ie. not to be spoken or otherwise performed).
Posted by: washerdreyer at May 5, 2006 8:29:37 PM
Realistically, it doesn’t make sense to expect honor in the areas of academia and publishing when honor in other walks of life have collapsed. I know nothing about publishing, but as far as academia goes, I can say this: No longer do colleges strive to produce honorable gentlemen (and ladies), but instead produce drones with union cards intended to join the managerial middle. Most universities are only interested in keeping enrollment up and no longer look to the task of creating "the whole man." Many would agree this is a good thing (universities don't expel students for producing children out of wedlock now, either). However, it is a bit silly to address plagiarism under a putative "honor code" when everyone knows that the point of the whole charade is not to produce researchers or scholars, but to certify workers via a $100,000+ 4-year IQ test.
Posted by: Mrs. Blessed at May 5, 2006 10:12:48 PM
As for (5) and maybe (6) I am not sure to that plagiarism is especially a sin of the young. For many, it's a response to a demand for their own work they cannot meet--Doris Kearns Goodwin, and possibly Lawrence Tribe, just as much as Kaavya Viswanathan. (Compare roles of book packagers and research assistants...) Why not be the smartest and most industrious person in the world if that's only what people ask of you?
As for (8): The plagiarism of a non-published work is interesting--often the interest in unpublished work relates to the identity of the author. Explicitly pirating the intentionally unpublished work of, say, Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger would bring more for an unscrupulous seller/publisher/compiler than claiming it as his own. Also, it seems like plagiarism is usually something anybody who can find a library or internet connection could do; but a person who has access to an unpublished work and appropriates it entirely (not just reports the ideas to the public) violates a more personal trust than the ordinary plagiarist, or else is a burglar.
If successful, such a plagiarist also appropriates the entire consumer surplus of a writing, rather than just whatever the other author didn't get yet. I'd say that's taking, not sharing.
Posted by: donkey at May 6, 2006 12:26:28 AM
Of course, there is a cultural bias here, too: I'm from one that thinks it is more important
who uses an idea appropriately than who invents it in the first place.
Think of it as like tennis: who serves is sometimes decisive of
who gets the point, but not always.
Posted by: Arnold Williams at May 6, 2006 11:25:55 AM
Perhaps students need better leadership:
A Pasadena newspaper said Thursday that it is reviewing a guest column written by the superintendent of public schools because the text contains phrases similar to a widely distributed sermon delivered years ago.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-clark5may05,1,3311259.story
Posted by: TomHynes at May 6, 2006 4:45:27 PM
1. Plagiarism is now easier to catch and publicize, mostly because of the Web, Google, and computer search programs.
...
3. "Cut and paste," and other technologies, make cheating and plagiarism easier.
So, it's getting easier, and it's getting harder. Which direction is cognitive dissonance moving?
Posted by: Jack Sprat at May 6, 2006 10:27:44 PM
It's easier to commit plagiarism, it's harder to commit plagiarism and get away with. Where's the dissonance, exactly?
Posted by: David H at May 8, 2006 5:55:25 AM
More to the point, it's a kind of technological arms race. It's cheaper for someone to plagarize your work, but easier for you or someone else to notice the plagarism, both because of better tools, and also because search engines are indexing almost everything. Your plagarized article in the Journal of Obscure Studies in Urdu can be found by someone searching for information from my article in the Journal of Even More Obscure Studies in Catalan.
Posted by: albatross at May 8, 2006 10:00:46 AM
There's an interesting blog covering plagiarism at http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/
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My girlfriend told me that Caltech recently fired an assistant professor who pasted around 15 pages from a student paper into her book manuscript
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