Steve Bainbridge is writing about self-plagiarism. This term seems contradictory, and Steve doesn't see the sense in beating yourself up over it: "Once you've got a pretty well-polished idea, which appropriately works its way into multiple sources, why do you need to keep paraphrasing it over and over again?" Agreed.
After reading Steve's entry, I noticed an article on the front page of yesterday's Wisconsin State Journal entitled "Who Owns An Idea?" (The link is to the Boston Globe, which featured the story on November 20. News travels slowly to Madison.) The article describes a longstanding dispute between two Penn sociologists over charges of "conceptual plagiarism." In a nutshell, Penn professor Elijah Anderson claims that a book co-authored by Kathryn Edin, another Penn sociologist, "owes a strong and almost entirely unacknowledged debt to" his previous books. (For more on that dispute, check here.)
This is not a new problem, of course, but it remains an interesting one. I am reminded of a business school colleague who described the transformation of a prominent university in California from a place a great collegiality and free exchange to a place where "everyone came to faculty meetings with a lawyer." When the stakes are high, ownership of ideas matters.
Fortunately, for most ideas, the stakes are not very high. On more than one occasion, I have noticed that the contents of a conversation to which I was a party subsequently appeared in a law review article without attribution. In most instances, it's no big deal. Indeed, I usually feel more flattered than wronged. Though acknowledgement is always nice, I suspect that most of us who spend our days floating ideas can't recall their provenance in every instance and are pretty forgiving of attribution failures.
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1. Posted by Shag from Brookline on December 1, 2005 @ 5:38 | Permalink
When I was a kid growing up in the Boston area (1930s-40s), I was cautioned about avoiding drafts so that I would not catch a cold. This was common advice back then and probably even now. When one catches a cold, one can many times recall getting caught in a draft a few days earlier. But if one kept a journal with an entry for each time one was caught in a draft, most likely most of these drafts would not have resulted in a cold.
Now we all have ideas that we express from time to time without paying much attention to developing the ideas or even thinking about where these ideas may have come from. So if someone picks up such an idea from me, why should she give me an attribution? If I were give an attribution, would I then have to give thought to whether the idea was original with me or picked up from someone else? Isn't there enough legal work out there for attorneys that it is now appropriate to expand plagiarism claims? In addition to dealing with original sin, do we also have to deal with originality sin? Perhaps a fedora could be developed so that a bulb would light up when one got an idea, which would be somehow recorded to be available as evidence when a plagiarism claim is filed for the stealing of the idea.
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