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]

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?

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

who did he plagiarize from? i know he was influenced a lot by ghandi's teachings. did he plagiarize from GHANDI? whoa dude. that is crazy.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know the details, but according to an article I just read on Amazon he plagiarised most of his doctoral dissertation. This became a lifetime habit. Apparently the "I have a Dream" speech is also plagiarised. The book that reveals al this is Plagiarism and The Culture War : The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans by Theodore Pappas

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

also, MLK apparently cheated on his wife all the time, and the CIA apparently had recordings of this, and would send them to her in the hopes that they could turn her against him. go usa; this is my tax dollars at work.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The campaign against MLK was directed, I believe, by J Edgar Hoover- whose private life was at least as colourful as his victim's.

The media assumes that public figures will be destoyed by revelations about their sexuality. In fact the general public is remarkably forgiving. Lewinsky didn't sink Clinton. And JFK is still a national hero in spite of everything we now know about his tomcatting.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

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