On Plagiarism ( "표절에 대한 소고" (2012. 07. 10. )의 영어 version )

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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).

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