Plagiarism

[poliphilo]

Someone just plagiarised a couple of sentences from my last post. They dressed 'em up a bit, but I know my own children.

It's a compliment, right?

I'm not cross (well, not very) and part of me is flattered. Since neither of us is making money out of this I don't regard it as any big deal. I just want the person that did it to know I know.

Dude, the convention is to put "borrowed" material in quotation marks and to give the original author credit.

Still, I'm easy. None of the stuff on this blog is copyrighted. And maybe (who knows?) there are other people out there taking credit for what I've done. I'm not a professional writer or photographer. My philosophy with this blog is that I'm putting messages in bottles and casting them out to sea. What happens next is up to wind and wave and ocean current.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Goodness gracious me, no; it wasn't you.

It was someone who's there on my flist, but with whom I've had minimal contact.

*paranoia*

[mazzie.livejournal.com]

looking at my last post, your last post, nothing is jumping out ... oddly panicked just the same.
the mind is a terrible thing.

Re: *paranoia*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oh dear! No, it wasn't you...

This was a blatant steal, not an accidental echo or anything like that. The "borrower" has inserted some guff of his/her own into my sentences but otherwise kept word order and phraseology the same.

Re: *paranoia*

[mazzie.livejournal.com]

well if i ever accidentally echo (quite possible; your words often inspire) feel free to call me on it. :)

Re: *paranoia*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks...

LJ is all about bouncing ideas around. And it's inevitable there's going to be a lot of echoing. We're building something together (what it is we don't quite know) "you in your small corner, and I in mine."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

LOL. Yup, you're the third....

And no, it wasn't you.

I guess we all read so much of one another's work that every once in a while we're liable to help ourselves to an idea, a phrase, quite innocently, thinking we've originated it.

But this wasn't like that. This person took too much and copied too slavishly.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't understand conscious plagiarism- not really. How can you take pride in something you haven't written yourself? The only circumstances in which I can understand (but not condone)it is where a person is up against a deadline and suffering writer's block. But that hardly applies to LJ.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating.

I've never given the phenomenon much thought before. I guess it's a lot more prevalent than I believed.

I've just been over to Amazon to take a look at the books you cite. Apparently there's a whole literature on plagiarism. Apparently Academia is plagued by it. Apparently Martin Luther King Jr was a serial plagiarist. My mind reels.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I just spoke to Ailz about it. She says that every time she submits an essay to the Open University she has to sign to say that none of it is plagiarised.

I can't get over MLK. I knew he had his weaknesses, but...

I mean, there he was, the most famous man in the world (more or less) with thousands of enemies all waiting for him to make a slip and he gave them ammunition by doing this. Was it a compulsive thing? Or was it, as seems to be the case with many public figures, that he liked to flirt with danger?

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Huh? I'm confused. Which text did Gardner plagiarize?

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

You do own your words. Something doesn't have to be explicitly copyrighted to be be copyrighted.

If it were me, I'd be really pissed, but I DO write for a living.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

This was a pointless steal. Or so it seems to me. A couple of sentences tucked away in a paragraph in the middle of a post.

Why bother?

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Compliment or not, it's wrong.

I haven't written much of anything lately, but if it was me, I apologize.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Gosh, no, it wasn't you.

It was a person way out on the badlands of my flist.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Funny! I worried, too, and hurried to check.

Whew.

I tend to pick up on people's writing rhythms, and it worries me sometimes because I do tend to "echo back" their style a bit.

In high school I used to read Dickens to get his rhythms rolling in my head before I wrote.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Of course it wasn't you.

Robert Louis Stevenson said he learned to write by playing "the sedulous ape" to a range of classic authors. I love that phrase.

The writer whose prose style I aped was G.K. Chesterton- a very bad model to choose- very distinctive, very mannered. It took me a lot of hard work to rid myself of his cadences.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

You certainly have your own cadences now.

(I knew it wasn't me, but I hicupped anyway: I leap to guilt.)

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

What's the phrase? Good artists plagiarise, great artists steal?

If they were going to do it as some sort of meme, it would be nice of them to link back. Heck, the phrase 'shamelessly stolen from X' is a common one at LJ.

I knew it wasn't me because I doubt you'd be contacted by your ex and were requesting brownies as a result, but I checked anyway.

(I sometimes hunt down old posts of mine on another board, another name... it's another life. What an odd stranger she is.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, my ex is long gone....LOL.

No it wasn't a meme or anything like. It was a sentence or two of mine not so cunningly woven into a paragraph of theirs.

Strange. But thanks to what the_red_shoes has told me I'm learning that plagiarism is a lot more common than I ever dreamed it was.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It seems that all the books about plagiarism are written by "detectives". It would be interesting to have one written by an offender.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Mebbe someone is pretending to be you. I advice a course of rampant paranoia. Or you could give them a snarky reply requesting credit, if you haven't already.

See, now I'm suffering major deja vu from reading your post, because I know I have seen it somewhere before but I don't recall where. Oddly enough, it's probably from reading your post several times. It's deja vu-ing itself now.

Still, I'm sorry someone swiped your words without permission or citation. Our words are our credit in this online community, makig plagiarism more of a theft here than elsewhere.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I often look at lines I've written and think, "now where have I seen you before?" It usually happens when I'm particularly pleased with something.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Hee. I have a lot of brownies. I could restock the girlscout population at this point.

I've often written something fairly nice and thought "oh wait, did I create that or did I take it from somewhere else?". Sometimes I've found that when it feels like words just belong in a particlar order it's because I read them in that order by the original author. You read something good and it sticks with you, and there are unfortunate cases of inadvertant recycling.

As George Carlin said (more or less) "What do they mean when they say 'in your own words?'. Do you have your own words? I've been using the same ones as everyone else."

(I can't google the exact quote for that line. Ironic, really.)

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I thought the dwarves/giants thing was originally from Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century.

And I'm all for imitation of structures - I don't see why using "just as...so..." should be bad at all (although it's a bit archaic for, say, an informational brochure).

[thewayupward.livejournal.com]

It would be really funny if your entire friends-list except the person who actually ripped off your stuff commented on this worriedly saying, is it me? In the interests of um making this dream into reality, lemme just say - is it me? ;_;

PS. Most times it'd probably be me - 's never happened yet, but I'm terrified it's going to happen someday. I swear, I have this completely worthless capacity to get words stuck in my head the way other people get song stuck in their heads. Upside is, I can quote vast swathes of poetry; downside is every time I say something I have to reread it to make sure I haven't accidentally quoted someone I just spoke to a couple hours ago, or something.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, 'tain't you:)

I think anyone who loves words is in danger of unconscious plagiarism- we've got so many of them swirling around our heads. Walter de la Mare has a story about how, entirely by accident, he largely misappropriated a friend's poem about an owl.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

[Looks over her journal in a frenzied state]

I think everyone thinks it's them. It's not me, is it poliphilo? I cannot imagine that you would be writing about--as burkean's entry put it--"copulation at a bar", LMFAO. But if there is anything I have written that strikes you as something you thought up first, even if the words are changed, do let me know and I will cite appropriately.

What a mess! I dealt with this sort of thing on Diaryland once. Someone on LJ took an ENTIRE poem and published it as theirs. I went ballistic. It wasn't even that important. I don't know what it was, but I felt extremely violated. After that, I never posted anything that I considered even mildly worth literary merit.

Really, it's not that I am not longer a great writer [laughs] I am just paranoid.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No. it wasn't you. Of course it wasn't! :)

A whole poem? that's serious plagiarism. I have left myself very open to this. I've posted quite a lot of "literary" stuff without even putting my name to it. I guess I knew I'd get ripped off sooner or later, but I suppressed the information.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

It's very difficult to guard against this, though, but you -can- and you should. You could add a little blurb about ownership or even look into this.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll consider my options.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

You know what my attitude toward this kind of thing is? I'm easy. None of the stuff on my blog is copyrighted. And maybe (who knows?) there are other people out there taking credit for what I've done. I'm not a professional writer or photographer. My philosophy with my blog is that I'm putting messages in bottles and casting them out to sea. What happens next is up to wind and wave and ocean current.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Bravo!
Bravissimo!

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

You win for a month!

You clever thing, you.

[zen-punk.livejournal.com]

If this were Slashdot, You, Sir, would be +5, Funny.

[morrison-maiden.livejournal.com]

Because I'm really paranoid, I just want to make sure that it wasn't me :-x

But that sucks. I mean, even if it doesn't bother you, people should be creative enough to think of those things on their own. At least putting it in as a quote would be flattery without the lifting/stealing part :\

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, of course it wasn't you. :)

Yeah, plagiarism is pretty low-down, but it seems there's a lot of it going on.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It must be very easy to plagiarize music unintentionally, seeing how we're continually bombarded with tunes.

I've always wondered about Lennon's "So this is Christmas". It shares its tune with a folk song about a racehorse- Stewball or Skewball or something like that. Was this plagiarism or did Lennon honestly think he'd made it up himself?

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

friend Joe the other night talked about a song he 'wrote' called Sally in the City. Joe's a banjo player, and he played the song in public. He was told by a fellow artist that it was very much like, written in the same key same time signature same progression an old fiddle tune called 'Sally in the Garden'.

Certainly an accident. Kind of like George Harrison's run in about "He's So Fine/My Sweet Lord.

But...deliberate?

We have new software here at the l.s. so we can run papers received through and make sure that everything is properly credited and so forth...

So sad.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Echo anxious question - it wasn't me was it?

IT seems a bit freaky to have one's words plagerised. I suppose when they are on the public domain they are no longer yours (the chief reason why I only write light stuff in mine) but still! Not even quotation marks.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, of course it wasn't you.:)

This person didn't use question marks. They just inserted my sentences into a paragraph of their own.

[zen-punk.livejournal.com]

It weren't me, I know it weren't!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Quite right. It wasn't you. :)