Which is Worse -- Sharing With Attribution, Or Plagiarism Without?
from the spot-the-thief dept
At the end of last year we wrote about the case of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former Federal Minister of Defense in Germany, who lost both his post and his doctorate when it turned out that he had plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis. Now the journal Science is reporting another possible case:
German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan is facing allegations that she plagiarized parts of her dissertation, published in 1980. A Web site, called schavanplag (in German) has listed 56 incidents in which the anonymous accuser says Schavan copied phrasing from improperly cited sources.
That on its own might not be so remarkable, were it not for the fact that there have been at least two other recent cases of plagiarism by German politicians -- Silvana Koch-Mehrin in June last year, and Jorgo Chatzimarkakis a month later.
Now, I don't know what exactly the positions of all those German politicians were on unauthorised sharing of files online, but I somehow doubt that any of them approved of it. And yet they seem not to have had any qualms about copying other people's work and passing it off as their own.
Beyond the double standards involved, there's another important point to be made here, I think. Plagiarism is about denying creators attribution that is rightly theirs. When people share files online, by contrast, there is no attempt to pass them off as their own work -- the attribution is always preserved, because otherwise people wouldn't know what they were downloading.
That's probably why online sharing can sometimes increase the sales of the works involved: it's a way of signalling that you enjoy something -- and a personal recommendation is perhaps the most powerful form of marketing around. Plagiarism, on the other hand, is a conscious attempt to boost your own reputation by depriving others of the recognition they are due, with all that this implies for lost rewards.
So which is worse? And which one should German politicians be most concerned about?
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Filed Under: annette schavan, germany, karl-theodor zu guttenberg, plagiarism, schavanplag
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Hypocrisy of politicians?
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Re: Hypocrisy of politicians?
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Re: Hypocrisy of politicians?
Sorry for being critical here, I really love Techdirt but this article is misguiding.
First, the author has no basis to claim the politicians who are involved are against file-sharing. Or if he does have such a basis (although he does admit he doesn't know what their positions on the issue are), he doesn't provide us with any evidence.
I know the German government has been cracking down hard on piracy in the last few years, with censoring websites, imposing heavy fines on infringers and holding people accountable for how others use their wifi networks. But that doesn't mean the 3 members of that government who have committed plagiarism are automatically against file-sharing. If anything, they're more likely to approve or at least tolerate it than to condemn it. Assuming they condemn it because of what the government does is ridiculous.
Second, those 3 politicians do not represent the entirety of the German government. Just because 3 people committed plagiarism doesn't mean the entire government approves of it.
And in fact, these people lost their positions as a result of the plagiarism they committed, not to mention their degrees. If anything this shows that Germany cracks down equally hard on piracy and plagiarism. I really don't see any hypocrisy here.
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Re: Re: Hypocrisy of politicians?
You do realise that you just did exactly what you are criticising the article of doing? And were as techdirt took steps to point out that they where making a guess you don't and you fail to provide anything to back up your claims.
Funny thing is that I actually do agree with you. If they wanted to make that point at all they should have had something more than guess work to back it up. I just found it funny that you got so mad you made the same mistake.
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Re: Re: Re: Hypocrisy of politicians?
I also said "If anything", which in this context means "if we really have to take a guess". I'd rather not take a guess either way, but if I do have to take one, the assumption I made seems the one with the greatest chance of being correct - as far as the information we have here goes.
Or maybe you realized I spoke of likelihood but didn't understand what basis I had for that, in which case I'll state the obvious: they committed plagiarism, which shows great disregard for intellectual property.
So let me rephrase my first post for you: If we must take a guess based on what information we have here, assuming that they condone or tolerate piracy is more reasonable than assuming they condemn it.
I wouldn't take a guess personally but since the author went that route, he should have assumed the opposite of what he did.
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Again I don't see why you had to guess anything other than to try and help your argument which is again exactly what you are bothered about in the post.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Hypocrisy of politicians?
You're assuming based on facts not in evidence and you are expecting us to believe you. For example, Lamar Smith, one of the most vocal "copyright infringement must stop" folks and the one behind SOPA copied photographs without permission for his website. Unless you have something to show us about these three being vocal about going easy on copyright infringement, you are making a more wild assumption than Glyn did. If there is one thing I know based on years of watching politicians, it is that they tend to push rules on others that they don't want to enforce on themselves, and those who don't tend to stand out (and some call them "Boy Scouts" as though it was a derogatory term.)
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Re: Re: Hypocrisy of politicians?
Really? Schavan is not member of CDU, THE party that keeps touting about copyrights, and how rightsowners get stolen from and that ratcheting up the laws is necessary?
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I do think scientific article should be free though, most research here is government funded, it's ridiculous that it's not freely accessible. And if an article isn't free, at the very least the prices for purchasing a single digital article should drop, I mean $40?! A price between $5 and $10 seems much but would at least be feasible, best would be between $2 and $4, especially since scientific magazines generally don't have to pay anything to get their material. Our university library spens MILLIONS to keep access to these darn magazines, so we're lucky. But I remember a foreign professor (who also works at a university) coming over for a few months who was dumbstruck by the amount of access we have here and went on a downloading spree. And even from here I regularly run into the paywall. So you can imagine how much some research suffers from lack of access to earlier studies...
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I'm not correcting you to sound pedantic, but simply because scientific journals are basically the official science - if it's published in those journals, it's very likely true (thanks to those journals reviewing scientific articles very thoroughly for flaws before publishing).
"Scientific magazines" makes it sound like you're talking about some cheap magazine that reports on recent scientific research often not accurately and with a lot of extrapolation. A scientific magazine would be to a scientific journal what Elle would be to a newspaper.
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That isn't even close to correct. Most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated, and that replication is far more important than the 'discovery.'
There are any number of reasons why research might come to a mistaken conclusion, and there far more 'wrong' conclusions than right ones. Even the best designed and executed study with a 95% confidence has a 5% change of confirming a false hypothesis, and there are plenty of studies with poor design, room for bias, small sample sizes, and that find relatively small effects that don't have as good a chance of getting it right.
An that's ok. That's science. It's a messy iterative process, and you don't loose points for getting it wrong. The scientists who really need to use the research understand the limitations.
But you're basic point is correct: Science journal != Science magazine.
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I agree with Doug though, not everything you find in scientific literature is true, far from it. Especially if you consider the fact that the information can be outdated in the case of older articles, or it can be on a subject on which there is no consensus yet, in that case some articles will be proven wrong in the future.
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Whereas with plagiarism, you have people cheating their way into degrees. Meaning they could end up in jobs they are totally unsuitable for. Would you want to hire someone who cheated in his theoretical physics course to run your nuclear power plant?
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Never the twain...
So I shall say nothing, lest I be accused of plagiarizing.
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Re: Never the twain...
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Re: Re: Re: Never the twain...
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Re: Re: Re: Never the twain...
HALT! HALT!
HALT!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Never the twain...
HALT! HALT!
HALT!
NEIN!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Never the twain...
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attach that line to an Eva wielding a to scale melee weapon (can't remember if it was Actually a hammer or a chain-axe) and bashing evil things.
'tis awesome.
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So I'll just say:
Take that!
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Depends who's writing the lobby/contribution checks.
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Have you learned NOTHING about spreading lies and propaganda? Why I oughta ...
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Bruce:
1) First you lie.
2) Then you lie again.
3) Then you lie again.
4) Then you ignore the facts.
That's right, isn't it?
Just checking.
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6) Profit!
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The same thing does not seem to exist in audiotory works or visible works.
I think it is fair to argue for a more well-defined "citation"-right of these works.
It should be easier to follow through on cases of plagiarism. It is essentially stealing...
The economy in scientific litterature is something many professors despice. I know many who give their works digitally to the students for free. In that world all that is important is the number of citations, which in this case is any mentioning of their articles. That is why wrong citation and plagiarism is so problematic.
In this case, calling it stealing is actually apropriate since the lack of citation is a 1 to 1 loss of citation for the author.
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Why are they rightly entitled to attribution? Attribution is certainly the right thing to do, but how is the original author materially damaged by another's failure to do so?
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