Plagiarism is still newsworthy, especially when it comes time to take a look at the side by side comparisons.
Seeing comparisons side by side isn’t just eye opening, it’s also kind of stunning when you consider that IT’S THE INTERNET AND YOU’LL GET CAUGHT FOR THE LOVE OF CRAP.
First up: Chris Anderson‘s Free, the sequel to Long Tail, which describes how acts of generosity in product distribution may create profit.
RUH ROH. Seems Anderson lifted material from Wikipedia, as the Virginia Quarterly Review accounted in detail. Their research was compounded like an orgasmic interest rate by Ed Champion who provides a buffet of examples as to where much of Anderson’s book text originated:
A cursory plunge into the book’s contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim….
EXAMPLE TWO
In a subsection called “The Three Prices,” Anderson writes about Derek Sivers’s “reversible business models,” but entire paragraphs from Sivers’s “Reversible Business Models” August 2008 blog post have been recycled with very few modifications.
Anderson, P. 32: “In China, some doctors are paid monthly when their patients are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid.”
Sivers: “In China, some doctors are paid monthly when you are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid. ”
Anderson, P. 31: “In one instance, he told his class at MIT’s Sloan School of Business that he would be doing a reading of poetry (Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) but didn’t know what it should cost. He handed out a questionnaire to all the students, half of whom were asked if they’d be willing to pay $10 to hear him read, and the other half of whom were asked if they’d be willing to hear him read if he paid them $10. Then he gave them all the same question: What should the price be to hear him read short, medium, and long versions of the poem?
Sivers: “Professor Dan Ariely told his class that he would be doing a reading of poetry, but didn’t know what it should cost. He handed out a price survey to all students, but secretly half of the surveys asked if they’d be willing to pay $10 to hear him read, and the other half asked if they’d be willing to hear him read if he paid them $10!
“Those who got the question about paying him were willing to pay. They offered to pay, on average, $1, $2, $3 for short, medium, long readings.”
Not to toot my own horn, but lemme grab it and make that funny sound with my lips that’s sort of like a fart but not quite: Yo, Chris. You missed the second part of my advice on internet relationships: Generosity and AUTHENTICITY are the best currency for anyone marketing anything on the Internet.
Authenticity is not lifting crap from Wikipedia.
But wait, just when you thought we were done, from Wikipedia to Celiac disease we go!
First, ever met someone with gluten intolerance, or Celiac disease? It sucks so impossibly hard, I can’t even tell you. It’s brutal because gluten hides out in a TON of foods.
Allegations of plagiarism, however, are not so much with the hiding. Elisabeth Hasselbeck has been accused of copright infringement in a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts federal court. Susan Hassett, who published her book, Living with Celiac Disease (note: profoundly unfortunate website ahoy) independently, alleges that Hasselbeck lifted verbatim phrases and lists from Hassett’s book, as well as the names and order of the chapters.
TMZ has a PDF of the letter sent on behalf of Susan Hassett, and I have here a PDF of the complaint filed in federal court. (Thank you anonymous).
Both documents list examples, from the chapter names to specific passages. Further, the TMZ letter states that Hassett posted on the ABC News website a “blog” (sic) indicating that she’d mailed a copy of her book to Hasselbeck over a year prior to the release of Hasselbeck’s book, and had noted how much the books had in common. Her post was removed.
According to the AP, Hasselbeck said in a statement that she worked “diligently and tirelessly” on her book about Celiac disease, and that the claims are “without merit.”
While I haven’t seen a blogger take on the side-by-side comparison of Hassett’s book and Hasselbeck’s, the comparison work on Anderson’s is just jaw dropping. What the hell, people? How is it that the wily internet is all over the obvious similarities, and the author blames the troublesome nature Wikipedia editing, and the process of deciding whether or not to footnote while the publisher calls the whole mess “an unfortunate mistake.” They still plan to release the book 7 July:
Anderson added that the errors were “a lot less” than VQR suggests.
“Take away the properly attributed quoted to the New York Times and others in the passages, the proper nouns and the random words that appear in sentences that are obviously my own, and the errors look a lot more limited,” he said in his email. “That’s no excuse – Wikipedia should have been cited, and will be in the electronic editions and online notes, but it’s more of a footnoting/attribution problem, and one that will be fixed before publication in all but the hardcover edition.”
You’re goddam right it was an unfortunate mistake, and once again, I and others are wondering why this happens again and again. In other words, someone isn’t doing their goddam job, and it’s not just the writer.
Perhaps it’s time to amend my statement, “IT’S THE INTERNET: you will get caught” to “It’s the internet! Do you really think we’re THAT gullible?!” As one commenter at VQR pointed out,, if Anderson’s book is all about the power of “Free,” how about that book hits stands for “free?” How about it, Hyperion?
Color me surprised: radio silence.
Lori, are you saying that if you came up with an original Hypothesis A in 2003, published it, and now another researcher in the field has come up with his contrary Hypothesis B, which you wish to demolish in a conference paper which will be published in the conference proceedings, you are not allowed to re-state your own original theory in your argument against his revision? Of course you are. If it were not so, the whole process of academic research would grind to a shuddering halt.
The rules relating to submission of graduate theses and dissertations may have very tight restrictions (which vary), but I am speaking of ordinary, refereed publication.
On a completely different tangent, as to re-using one’s own work, one of the first lessons one learns in the world of nonfiction magazine freelancing is the idea of “double dipping”—using one round of research and spadework to produce several articles with different slants and approaches for several different editorial markets.
The key, of course, is “different slants and approaches”. One doesn’t publish the same article in two or more places—particularly direct competitors—without proper disclosures and understandings in place; one writes different texts tailored to each different audience. But so long as the underlying spadework is one’s own, one is understood to be free to use that spadework to one’s own best advantage. [That said, I’d be cautious about too heavily re-using source material for which I’d billed expenses to a particular market, absent clear guidelines and/or an understanding with the editor in question.]
Funny you should mention that, because I’ve had that happen! I questioned something I saw in an article as being very similar to the Wikipedia entry on the same subject, and subsequent investigation showed that the Wikipedia entry and the article were written by the same author.
I’m saying that for my program I couldn’t use the refutation of Hypothesis B as my Master’s thesis unless it involved substantial new scholarship on Hypothesis A and I had permission from my adviser.
I’m going to take a heretical view here and say that, while wholesale copying is bad, pursuing issues such as the repetition of individual sentences in a novel-length work is actually bad for literature as a whole, especially when applied to fiction.
Elegant re-use of phrases from previous work is one of the glories of English literature. You could footnote them all, but it breaks up the flow of the story or poem.
I think we would have lost a lot if TS Eliot hadn’t felt free to embed tiny fragments of other peoples’ poems in _The Waste Land_. I’m not sure that work could have been effectively written in any other way. Why do we need to make such re-use of works written within the last century illegal and unethical? Does it really help creators?
The last paragraph of the novel _Clouds End_ is the same, except for a name change and a pronoun change, as the last paragraph of _The Return of the King_. I found the artistic effect stunning—the resonance with the earlier work threw new light on the end of the later one. Should Stewart have been forbidden to do this? Who would be better off if he was? Certainly sales of _The Return of the King_ are not likely to drop because you can get one paragraph of it in a different book, so it’s not a sales-protection issue. Is Stewart trying to pass off someone else’s work as his own? I don’t think so; I think he fully expected most of his readers to recognize the paragraph and know where it came from.
I think we are, culturally, a bit crazy about this topic, and would do better to back off. (And I say this as a university professor who would, none the less, reject a plagiarized paper. It’s perfectly legitimate to insist that academic papers be the author’s own work. But we don’t have to extend that rule as far as we do.)
Mary Kaye
I agree that sometimes an unascribed quotation can be seen as an hommage – like embedding a theme from one composer into an original work (Gounod’s use of Bach as a ground in Ave Maria, for example, or hundreds of melodies written over Pachebel’s Canon). But sometimes it really does appear to be just laziness: I once ran across a scene in a book by Christopher Stasheff which had been lifted from another book in the same series. Side by side, the two scenes were exactly the same, with the character’s name changed. I suppose it is possible he simply ‘recalled’ the scene, or even wished to reference the earlier book… but that’s not what it looked like.