Brian Martin--"Plagiarism: A Misplaced Practice"

Brian Martin--"Plagiarism: A Misplaced Practice"
Journal of Information Ethics, Fall 1994, Vol. 3, No. 2

Summary: Shift plagiary stigma from competitive plagiarism (academic/student) to institutional exploitative plagiarism (corporate/bureaucratic/ghost writing/academic) because it is the more harmful and egregious type of intellectual theft. We should view competitive plagiarism as proper manners and penalize those who commit improprieties in accordance with breaking etiquette.

Premise: Prevent plagiarism by:

• properly designing assessment procedures (e.g. getting students to use their own experiences)
• setting good examples--citing sources for lecture notes
• introducing an honor system

Most student plagiarism goes undetected. Therefore, punishment is delivered to "only a minority of offenders."

There are many different types of pagiarism:

• word-for-word plagiarism--"occurs when someone copies phrases or passages out of a published work without using quotation marks, without acknowledging the sources, or both.
• paraphrasing plagiarism--"some of the words are changed, but not enough"
• plagiarism of secondary sources--"when a person gives reference to original materials and perhaps quotes them, but never looks them up, having obtained both from a secondary source–which is not cited.
• plagiarism of the form of a source--"cases in which the plagiarizer does look up the primary documents but does not acknowledge a systematic dependence on the citations of the secondary source."
• plagiarism of ideas--"an original though from another is used but without any dependence on the words or form of the source."
• plagiarism of authorship--putting ones name on someone's work

 Most student-generated plagiarism is word-for-word plagiarism. However, much of this is inadvertent, accidental.

Fear of plagiarism in academia leads to fear and compartmentalized, non-communicative environment.

Plagiarisms revisionists believe:

• Much more common for students and academics, which means it often goes unpunished. 
• It is serious and needs to be guarded against. (traditionalists and revisionists agree)
• Caused mostly by accident and inexperience (traditionalists and revisionists agree)
• Penalties should discourage plagiarism

INSTITUTIONALIZED PLAGIARISM

Some forms of plagiarism are socially acceptable:

• ghostwriting
• honorary authorship--choosing authors for market value, which doesn't always reflect the amount of work done. 
• editors
• political speechwriting; 
• These types of plagiarism are "built into the structures and operations of bureaucracies and is hardly ever categorized as plagiary." 
• This institutionalized plagiarism contrasts with competitive plagiarism--academic plagiarism. 
• "Institutionalized plagiarism is a feature of systems of formal hierarchy , in which credit for intellectual work is more a consequence than a cause of unequal power and position." Essentially, worker produce the work of the bureaucracy, not individual scholarship. 
• Retail plagiarism and wholesale plagiarism--an analogy borrowed from Chomsky and Herman.
• Retail plagiarism--"exploits the intellectual labor of a few people at a time (competitive)
• Wholesale plagiarism--"involves the systematic exploitation of large numbers of workers as a matter of standard procedure." (institutionalized) 
• Most issues of plagiarism focus on retail rather than wholesale. We readily attack a politician who plagiarizes a specific speech, but we don't attack the institution of speech-writing as a whole. 
• We probably focus on competitive plagiarism because "those who write about plagiary work in the competitive sector."
• Example: college administrators can use ghost writers for speeches with impunity, but students and professors cannot commit the same types of plagiarism in their roles at the university. 

DOES IT MATTER?

•  Academic guarding against plagiarism advances fairness and ownership, neither of which "show that plagiarism is a significant hindrance to the 'quest for truth.'"
• Some argue it allows undeserving "second-rate" intellectuals to get ahead. 
• The solution, according to Martin can be discovered by looking at institutionalized plagiarism.
• It reinforces the power and position of elites. 
• It "reduces the accountability of subordinates, who do not have to take formal blame for the inadequacies of their work."

•  Other arguments against institutionalized plagiarism:
• reduces innovation
• causes alientation
• represents inefficient use of worker talents

• Institutionalized plagiarism may be morally acceptable if it serves the public good and doesn't exploit non-elites.

PLAGIARISM IN A SELF-MANAGED SOCIETY

• Could plagiarism exist in a society that is self-managed, democratic, equally distributed in power, etc?
• Institutionalized plagiarism would disappear with the loss of elitism.
• Or credit for work and ideas would exist solely so the society could better allocate its resources for future needs.

• Competitive plagiarism could still exist.
• most people will still desire recognition for ideas
• plagiarism would exist as a matter of etiquette. 
• "Since credit for ideas would not be important for career advancement and because contributions to collective well-being would be considered highly, it is even possible that creative workers would decline to claim full credit for their work, allowing plagiarism to occur by default rather than by commission."

•  Our concerns about plagiarism don't mesh with the reality of production. "No single person can make a contribution without relying extensively on the prior and ongoing work of others. Producing goods in a factory depends on systems of education and transport, prior inventions, markets, etc."

Martin argues for a reduced emphasis on competitive plagiarism so that the stigma and power of accusing people of plagiarism will disappear. Since we can't catch all plagiarism, since we acknowledge and tolerate institutionalized plagiarism, and since competitive plagiarism cannot exist independent of the intellectual properties of others, we should diminish our concerns over competitive plagiarism.

We should therefore treat plagiarism like etiquette instead of theft. Instead we should shift the stigma of competitive plagiarism to institutionalized plagiarism to challenge the system of exploitation.

"Concern about plagiarism has been diverted from the most serious and pervasive problems and channeled into excessive concern about less serious problems. This process is clearly one that serves the interests of the biggest intellectual exploiters. 
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