Chris Hedges and Slavoj Žižek.
First question: If you’re a leftist, is plagiarism a bad thing? Left philosophy tends to argue that “knowledge” is a social product, that individuals are products of social circumstances, what’s yours is mine, and so on.
Second question: WTF? These are both smart guys. They know they can think for themselves and crank out lots of words. So why on earth would they do it?
My question is, for whom is plagiarism a bad thing? Not Hedges or Zizek, not their readers, not their publishers. So perhaps those who were plagiarized (Katz & Hornbeck)? They didn’t seem to much care though. It is a copyright violation, I suppose, but I’m an “information wants to be free” kinda guy, so that doesn’t make the case for me.
Regarding “WTF,” it saves time and if someone’s already written exactly what you want to say and has said it better than you ever could, it makes sense to just use what’s already available. When I blog, I excerpt/blockquote and link, but the information presented to my readers isn’t really any different than if I had just copied and pasted verbatim and didn’t bother with any attribution. I’m in the habit of the linking approach, but I don’t see anything really wrong with the latter approach of not bothering with attribution. Someone can always google a given passage if they want to see who really wrote it.
Now I understand that an academic philosopher such as yourself has reasons to strongly dislike plagiarism, but that would be a perspective and bias that I don’t share at all, and neither do many others.
And note that the concepts of copyright and plagiarism are weakening at a very rapid rate. For example, younger folk not only copy music without thinking about it, but they can’t even understand why it might possibly be wrong. If hardly anybody thinks it’s wrong, it’s not.
Bret,
Plagiarism does two things which are objectively bad. First, it breaks the chain of reasoning. Part of evaluating an idea is evaluating it in context with its antecedents. If someone obscures the source of their reasoning, they make it more difficult to evaluate their reasoning.
Second, it privileges the powerful at the expense of the skilled. If people cannot get recognition for their work because any good idea can be stolen by someone with a bigger factory or more page views, then how are we to identify and promote people with useful skills?
In this context, your example of copying music without the artist’s permission is flawed. The analogous situation would be if someone copied an album and re-released it under their own name. If you then listened to the album and enjoyed it, you would be unable to find the true author in order to enjoy more of the sort of music that you like. The artist is hurt and you are hurt, and people with control over digital distribution are encouraged to rent-seek by stealing others’ works.
Finally, this is absolutely filled with fail: “If hardly anybody thinks it’s wrong, it’s not.” If I may take it to the outrageous extreme, hardly anyone in Germany thought that pogroms against Jews were wrong, and it took many B-17 loads of bombs to convince them otherwise. Does that mean that they were right?
Neil,
Regarding your first objection to plagiarism. If the overall writing is less informative with the plagiarism, then yes, but all you’re really saying is that less informative writing is worse than more informative writing of any kind. If the overall writing is better with the plagiarism because the plagiarist is a relatively crappy writer then your argument doesn’t hold. So I don’t find your first argument convincing in any way.
Regarding your second objection. While there might be some merit in the general case (though I still don’t agree), in this specific case, neither of the authors whose material was plagiarized seemed to care very much, and secondly, they were both already famous and “powerful” to start with. As far as “skilled,” but obscure authors go, being plagiarized by a more famous author would actually be helpful; something to add to their resumes. For example, though not particularly “skilled,” I would like nothing better than to find some paragraphs I’ve written for my blog plagiarized in something like the NY Times. I would cut it out and frame it!
You are correct that my music example wasn’t a perfect metaphor, but some of your reasoning is flawed. You wrote, “encouraged to rent-seek,” yet, by definition, if there were no copyright law, it would be impossible for anyone to rent-seek.
Finally, your final paragraph argument doesn’t work either. By definition, not hardly anyone thought the Nazis were wrong and the proof is that there were “many B-17 loads of bombs to convince them otherwise.” In other words, much of the rest of the world thought they were wrong.
If, the entire world thought exterminating the Jews was perfectly moral, then it would be. Begin Jewish, I rather hope the world doesn’t come to that conclusion, of course, but there’d be nothing I could do about it if they did.
Bret,
Words fail me. You are a monster, a giant flashing billboard for the consequences of amorality.
Neil,
In other words, you have no rational argument. 🙂 Got it!
Apparently, this applies to all commies. 😉
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457000
Here’s the abstract for the paper at SSRN that ASB links to aboove:
“The (True) Legacy of Two Really Existing Economic Systems”
Dan Ariely
Duke University – Fuqua School of Business
Ximena Garcia-Rada
Duke University
Lars Hornuf
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Heather Mann
Duke University – Fuqua School of Business
June 19, 2014
Munich Discussion Paper No. 2014-26
Abstract:
By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 24
Keywords: experimental economics, cheating, cross-culture study
JEL Classification: C93, D63, P51
working papers series