On plagiarism
Wooil M. Moon
Plagiarism is appropriating the work of others
and claiming implicitly or explicitly that it is one’s own, and there are
increasing reports of plagiarism not only by students but also by established
writers and academics. The word ‘plagiarism’ comes from the Latin word ‘plagiarius’ (kidnapper) to denote someone stealing or kidnapping
someone else’s idea or work(1). The first account of ‘plagiarius’ in the English language is reported to be by
the English Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson in 1601(2), who was a
contemporary of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), but acts of plagiarism have
been committed for much longer than that.
The Roman poet Marcus Martial used the word plagiarius
in the first century, when he complained that another poet had ‘kidnapped’ his
verses(3). It is difficult to define the precise meaning of plagiarism, although a broad
definition might explain it as the use
of another’s work, words, or ideas without giving reasonable and appropriate
credit acknowledging the original author
or source. Today, plagiarism is also closely
related to intellectual property rights, which often becomes a legal issue,
especially when new inventions, patents, industrial design, music, arts, or
trade secrets are involved. In academia and in the literary community,
plagiarism has long been recognized as a serious ethical offence rather than as
a legally punishable crime. Various degrees of infringements of intellectual
property rights and plagiarism have often been overlooked or discovered too
late for authorities to act. Recently, reported cases of plagiarism have been
increasing rapidly not only in the fields of science and engineering, but also
in the literary and liberal arts communities, likely because of the vast amounts of online
digital information content, which is widely and freely available to the global
internet community.
It has been over
a half century since the Telnet was first introduced. This was followed by the
standardization of TCP/IP, allowing a world-wide network of interconnected TCP/IP
networks, which we now call the
internet. Most of us in science and engineering thought that the internet would
allow us to build a new world through which we could model new human behaviours,
values and relationships. Many thought the experience of being online would change a person’s
consciousness as well because anybody in the whole world can read what he or
she thought or wrote. The internet and online technology in general, however, has
evolved along a quite different path, away from many people’s initial expectations.
Members of various online “communities” often hide behind a nickname, while others
surrender their identities and ideals knowingly (or unknowingly), for a buck, or
because satisfying one’s curiosity is only a click away. The result is that, among
other things, the virtual world created open
forums for politicians, online markets for corporations, and some lawless
playgrounds for criminally inclined individuals. Today, the internet also provides
instant access to vast amounts of information and other content that is of use
to students, researchers, writers, and other special interest groups. Anyone
who uses the internet is vulnerable
to potential unknown threats that could be lurking there as well. On the
technical side, the internet has made detecting plagiarism easier and quicker than it was before,
especially in literary or technical disciplines of the virtual world.
Several
plagiarism detection tools have become available in recent years, including
Eve2, Turnitin, CopyCatchGold, JPlag, and CrossCheck, which are used
increasingly in educational institutions and particularly within the science
and engineering community(4). These new tools automatically check the
online database, which includes numerous
journal publications, and return the extent of the plagiarism with basic
statistics. This new technical development can reduce plagiarism problems and potentially
protect people’s intellectual property rights in the future. However, before
one gets caught by plagiarism detection tools, we all should strive for honesty
and model the responsibilities that befit an academic and learned individual, which
include respect for other people’s ideas and creative efforts.
There are
several notable suspected cases of plagiarism in literary communities around
the world. One famous case involves the author T.S. Eliot, whose work “The
Waste Land” had been praised as the greatest poem written in English, which
might have won him the Nobel prize for literature. However, a fair amount of
“The Waste Land” was claimed to have been inspired and partly copied from an
almost unknown American poet named Madison Cawein, who died early before he
became known widely (4). Cawein’s poem “Waste Land” was first
published in the Chicago-based magazine “Poetry”, which included Ezra Pound as
an editor. Cawein’s “Waste Land” contains several metaphors that were later
used word for word by T.S. Eliot in his work “The Waste Land”(5).
In Korea, there
was a 16th century poetess named Heo Nanseolheon (許蘭雪軒), a sister of
Heo Gyun (許筠) who
wrote the famous “Hong Gil-Dong (洪吉童傳)”. Heo Nanseolheon’s “Vision of a Phoenix” is a
classic of Korean literature, especially in the 16th century Joseon
(朝鮮)
Kingdom. Heo Nanseolheon was a brilliant poetess from an aristocratic family
who faced a tragic death at age 26 or 27, and her brother Heo Gyun compiled his
sister’s poems. Heo Nanseolheon wrote Hansi (漢詩) poetry in Chinese characters using
the strict rhyme rule. She was educated within her family at home, because
there were no schools for girls or women in the 16th century Joseon
Kingdom. Choe-Wall discussed the possibility of plagiarism in Heo Nanseolheon’s
poems at length in “Vision of a Phoenix: the Poems of Heo Nanseolheon”(2003)
, which was published in the Cornell University East Asia Series(6).
She concluded that 18 out of 214 poems
were considered to have been plagiarized
from Chinese poems. However, the 18 verses, which were the same as the Chinese poems,
might not have been a real case of plagiarism; it may tell us instead that she
had extensively read the poems by famous Chinese poets Li Po (or Li Bai , 李白)and Tu Fu (杜甫)of
China’s Tang Dynasty, when she was learning to write and emulated their style,
unaware of the extent to which she was borrowing from their work.
A year or so ago, some of the available plagiarism
software was run through one of the Korean Writers Association internet web
site in North America, and there were some unexpected surprises! One of the essays
tested was almost 99% copied from an essay posted in a Korean literature internet site, with the author’s name replaced, and in another
case the verses in one poem was at least two-thirds copied from a poem
published few year back in Korea. Considering the large number of active writers
, and of related online literary internet sites, it is expected that there will
be an even larger number of plagiarised postings discovered if we run the plagiarism
detection software on other literary sites. The question we now have to ask
ourselves is, “Is literary theft a crime? Or is it just the borrowing of
somebody else’s writing? “
Even through all
these evolutionary processes, the virtual world we have become so accustomed to
through the internet and, more recently, through SNS (social networking services)
such as Facebook or Twitter, cannot control or regulate the ethical and legal
aspects of human behaviors. Will Derrida’s [2001]
comment, "The history of literature
is constituted by the kind of thing [reproduction], by quasi-mechanical and
automatic functions, always on the border of plagiarism", become a 21st
century prophecy for our discussion on plagiarism? As history has
repeated and endured, will the stealing of literary verses, academic
dishonesty, and breach of journalistic ethics endure and continue? Our world
may never really be free of plagiarism, even if computers can automatically
detect plagiarism and catch the unethical behaviors of authors. Plagiarism is
symptomatic of declining trust and the degradation of the conditions needed to
maintain strong intellectual virtue in the academic and literary communities.
The final choice ultimately remains personal,
with honesty, mutual respect, commitment, and integrity being vital.
References
1. The Online Educator, A Guide to Creating the Virtual Classroom, M. M. Lynch (2002)
2. Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language, Francis E. Jackson Valpy
(2005)
3. Martial: the Unexpected Classic, J.P.
Sullivan (1991)
4. International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies – CompSysTech’07,
Proceedings, R. Lukashenko, V. Graudina, J. Grundspenkis, IIIA – 18-1~18-6
(2007)
5. The Times Literary Supplement, Letter from Robert Ian Scott (8 December
1995)
6. Acta Koreana, Book Review of “Vision of a Phoenix: the Poems of Heo
Nanseolheon” (2003) by Yang Hi Choe-Wall (8 February 2005)
(This paper is based on the material first
presented at the Workshop on the
Intellectual Property Rights in November 2012).