Plagiarism

Charles Hartman wrote an interesting article on being plagiarized. Some guy from Qatar e-mailed Hartman (who lives in England) telling him that someone in England had plagiarized one of his poems. Soon enough, a bunch of (mostly) Brit poets working through Facebook groups exposed more and more such cases. Don’t you just love the Internet?!

Hartman wondered why perpetrators (like David R. Morgan in his case) did it in an era where being found out and shamed in front of thousands is not at all difficult? Wouldn’t info about such acts now sitting for all eternity in Google’s servers, to be queried and found even decades later be a deterrent? Why do plagiarists still take such risks, Hartman wondered?

Hartman also felt insulted:

“The insult was partly that the plagiarist assumed my poem was too obscure for anyone to discover his theft.”

That is partly the answer to the risk question, isn’t it? Guys like Morgan must have considered the odds of getting caught and decided guys like Hartman were unknown enough to be worth the risk.

Plagiarists usually edit the text/poem they copy. Usually in small ways, sometime a bit more than that. Hartman terms what happened to his poem as “mutilation”. But what if the plagiarist had improved the poem instead of mutilating it? Hartman’s response:

“How would I feel if the thief had improved my poem? I’d be abashed, but I’d also be bewildered that someone who could do that would bother, rather than write a better poem of his own.”

(In science, they call that seeing farther because they have stood on the shoulders of giants!)

Logically speaking, could Hartman have chosen to be flattered? As stated in that old saying: “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”? Hartman considers that option too but rejects it:

“Plagiarism isn’t imitation. Imitation means trying to duplicate a process you’ve watched someone else go through. Defining plagiarism is trickier than you might think, but most of the time we distinguish it from other kinds of copying (allusion, quotation) fairly easily: it’s plagiarism if the copyist hopes no one will notice.”

That is also what makes plagiarism so tough to nail: how much editing (after copying) makes it different enough? I guess US Judge Potter Stewart got the best answer to that question when he said during a trial on hard-core pornography:

“I’ll know it when I see it.”