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CROSSING INTO PLAGIARISM
Posted June 18, 2002
SUMMARY
By its nature, scholarship draws on previous scholarship, which means that academic writers run the risk of drawing too heavily on what's come before. The line can be blurry, which makes for lively ethics debates. A transgression also can be copyright infringement, a legal issue with stiff penalties. |
By Zick Rubin
When you take stuff from one writer, wrote Wilson Mizner (though he may well have stolen the line from someone else), it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research.
No one can fault a textbook author, who sets out to present a discipline to students, for drawing upon the work of others. But an author who relies too heavily on a single source may cross the blurry line between scholarship and plagiarism. From a legal standpoint, if you take too much from any one place, it's not only plagiarism but also copyright infringement, and the penalties are likely to be stiff.
For more than 30 years, Child Development and Personality by Paul Mussen, John Conger and Jerome Kagan, has been one of die most widely used college textbooks for child development courses. I used it myself as an undergraduate psychology major in 1963. It was the book with the bright chartreuse cover.
With success came competition. And in 1973, when Mussen and his colleagues examined the newly published Child Psychology, developed by the Meredith Corporation, they discovered a degree of imitation that went far beyond flattery.
As the facts emerged in the lawsuit brought by the Mussen team and their publisher, Harper & Row, the imitation was hardly accidental. In 1971, Meredith had decided to enter the child psychology market and identified the Mussen text as the model to be faithfully followed. Meredith proceeded to distribute detailed chapter outlines of the Mussen text to a squad of freelance writers whose job was to write new chapters based on the "model."
Although a psychologist named Brian Sutton-Smith was listed as the author of the text, he was no more than a part-time consultant. The real authors, if a managed book of this sort can be said to have authors at all, were the freelance writers. The writers were not professional psychologists -- but with the help of the "model" they didn't need to be. One of the writers had never taken a course in psychology and was moonlighting from his full-time job as a speech writer for Exxon. The textbook that emerged was closely patterned after the Mussen text, not only in its overall plan but also on a paragraph-by-paragraph level.
In a historic case, a federal judge ordered Meredith's copycat psychology textbook off the market. It too closely resembled an earlier Harper & Row textbook, These two passages, to the judge, proved the plagiary: |
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Rubin, a psychology textbook author, is an attorney in the Media and Entertainment Group at Boston's Hill & Barlow.
This article appeared earlier elsewhere.
© 1995-2002, Zick Rubin. All rights reserved. |
Plagiarism,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize --
Only be sure to always call it please
"research."
-- Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky |
The Society of Academic Authors invites members to comment on authoring issues:
editor@sa2.info. |
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MUSSEN
ORIGINAL
THE INFANT'S SENSES
Surprisingly, the newborn is a remarkably capable organism from the moment he begins to breathe. He can see, hear, and smell, and he is sensitive to pain, touch, and change in position. The only sense modality which may not be functioning immediately at birth is taste, but even this sense develops rather quickly. The infant is biologically ready to experience most of the basic sensations of his species from the moment of birth. This is not true of all mammals. Puppies, as the reader may know, are born blind. |
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| MEREDITH
PARAPHRASE
THE INFANT'S EQUIPMENT
From his first breath, the child is remarkably well-equipped for life. He can see, hear, smell, touch, and feel pain. All his senses, except taste, are operating immediately, and even taste develops rapidly.
From his first moment outside the womb, the human infant can feel most stimuli that adults experience. Unlike many mammals -- the puppy, for instance, born deaf and blind -- the senses of the newborn child are in good working order.
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From birth through adolescence, the Meredith book took its cues from Musson, even as it attempted to disguise the larceny by varying the wording. Presented with such evidence of piracy, federal Judge Richard Owen ordered the Meredith book off the market, and the Mussen team ultimately recovered a substantial sum in damages.
As Judge Owen scornfully declared: "It is hardly an inducement to someone like a Dr. Musson to do the years of research and scholarship needed to produce an authoritative text if an untrained freelance speech writer for an oil company may paraphrase major portions and make a competing text out if it."
While the Mussen-Meredith case is a blatant instance of textbook plagiarism, other cases are less elegant. In a case brought in 1971 by McGraw-Hill against Worth, involving competing economics textbooks, the judge noted that "certain Spencer passages, read after their McConnell counterparts had been read, did give an impression of deja vu, but only in the most general way." In this and other cases, courts have held that parallels in books' organizational scheme are not enough to sustain a finding of copyright infringement. After all, copyright protection does not extend to ideas -- if it did, scholarship itself would stagnate -- but only to the expression of those ideas.
It remains possible that the organization of one book could track the organization of a second book so closely -- right down to the B or C heads -- that infringement would be found. But the smoking gun of copyright infringement remains verbatim copying or paragraph-by-paragraph paraphrasing, not similarity of organization.
What about unconscious plagiarism? In some celebrated cases of literary theft, the accused author expresses as much shock as anyone else that his words shadow those of someone else. These authors may in fact be telling it as they see it: people can internalize the work of theirs so completely that they later reproduce it -- with the best of intentions -- as their own. Unfortunately for the internalizers among us, unconscious copying is just as illegal as intentional copying, The borrowing of small bits and pieces may be permissible, but the appropriation of larger chunks -- whether conscious, subconscious or unconscious -- can be copyright infringement.
From one perspective, all academic authors plagiarize because they necessarily stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. "Art is either plagiarism or revolution," Guagin wrote, and few of us are revolutionaries. But Wilson Mizner may be right about the distinction between "plagiarism" and "research." The formula for scholarship -- and the best way to stay clear of copyright infringement -- is to gather our material from many sources and to shape it into a product that is distinctively our own. |
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