Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of stealing a piece of someone’s soul. And, I would argue that such acts are usually done by individuals who are soulless. I guess this sounds a bit harsh, but I love to blog, and the thought of someone stealing my work from the Internet upsets me a great deal – although I’m not sure anyone outside my family has even read my blog!

Wheather the work product is an idea to patent a pet project, writing a poem or play, the plagiarist motive is rooted in selfishness as well as a lack of basic fundamental personal ethics. In the long term, committing such acts winds up robbing the plagiarist of her own identity. In an academic environment, especially as a student, it can become similar to a life long heroin addiction. Instead of the student developing her own set of skills and abilities to create and learn, she becomes consumed with honing a set of skills that will force her to continue stealing from others, until she is finally caught. Imagine if you will, graduating with a degree in any discipline and not having the technical ability to execute work with even a modest degree of competency – what a sad outcome that would be.

Plagiarism can occur by an act of omission. I remember I had a boss that would never give her subordinates credit for their hard work. In discussions with her boss, there was never an acknowledgement of the contributions of her staff – she received accolades and bonuses for collaborative work as though it were hers alone. I would argue that anytime you pass off someone’s work as your own, or, in the case of my former boss, you omit the fact that other’s contributed to the work product, that this constitutes an act of Plagiarism by omission. This particular individual got a negative reputation in the company very fast. She was not well liked, and as sometimes happens with large companies, she was promoted to a position way past her level of competence. We always used to say, “Watch your back – Sue is coming down the hall.” I worked for her a little over one year, and when an opening in another department became available, I applied for the new job, and got it! Had I not received the transfer, I probably would have quit the company, largely due to the fact that I knew how she operated, and as long as she was around, there would not be a career path for me.

Plagiarism is a very serious problem because we are turning out so-called “professionals” with fancy credentials that lack the skills and knowledge base to provide services and products to the public. What if you find yourself in an emergency room one day and the doctor orders 10cc’s of epinephrine, and you wind up with 10cc’s of epikak syrup on a spoon? That would make for a messy time at the very least. How often have we heard horror stories about botched plastic surgery, mechanics ripping off unsuspecting customers for unneeded work, or billed for work not even performed? While it doesn’t sound like such things are related at all to plagiarism, I argue that when you compromise your personal ethics and steal intellectual work, then, use it as your own, you cheat yourself from acquiring the skills to know how to do such things as provide quality services, weather it be fixing a car or giving a woman a new set of symmetrical boobs.

I don’t believe that plagiarism is simply the act of stealing intellectual property. This is still a despicable act, but should be classified more as theft of service. Without the subsequent use of the stolen work product for your own benefit, then, in my mind, a plagiaristic act did not occur. But the act speaks to basic personnel ethics that are lacking in the individual. And, you must ask yourself, if you steal it, aren’t you going to use it? It would be sort of like buying illegal drugs, then not using them – come on, is that really going to happen?

When I was kid (in the 1960s) drug use was both stigmatized (by parents and adults), and glorified by the “hippie generation.” I remember my father used to rant and rave about using drugs, and would make me watch episodes of Dragnet (Jack Webb and Harry Morgan starred in the series.) A lot of the episodes involved showing us what would happen if we started down the path of using drugs. While I did try smoking Marijuana a couple of times, I think my Dad scared me enough that I didn’t experiment too much, and, come to find out, he was probably right: smoking weed often times did lead to using stronger drugs such as LSD, Heroine, and Cocaine. Starting down the path of compromising your personal ethics, by committing such acts as plagiarism, I believe, leads to other bad behaviors – it starts to become something that is easily rationalized and justified until the sensitivity to the impact on others becomes non-existent.

Strong personal ethics seem to be even more essential today with the vast amount of information available on the Internet. I remember when I was in college in the 1970s, and a professor would give us an assignment for a Term Paper. I would spend many hours in the school library, going though index cards, writing down book references, marching up and down the halls finding books, articles in papers, and magazines, then waiting in line to make copies of the materials, so that I could then sit down and digest the information, and become informed enough on a particular subject to write about it with some sort of clarity. And, if I used another person’s work, I spent a lot of time on a manual typewriter, creating footnotes.

Now, we just Google. And, technology makes it very east to cut and paste words and phrases written by others into our own documents. But, technology also makes it easy to footnote someone else’s work. So, even though it may have been harder to commit an act of plagiarism before the advent of the Internet and personal computing, we still have always had a choice. It is perfectly fine to incorporate ideas and facts from the work of others (largely to support your own thesis); provided that proper footnoting is used to mark up the document to clearly indicate that it was written by someone else. If you look in any professional journal, there are always painstaking references made to the work of others whenever the author is presenting her own findings of research.

The best tip that I can think of to avoid committing either a covert or inadvertent act of plagiarism is to do your best to be honest with yourself. One of the best lessons in life is to be honest, not just to others, but to yourself. It is so easy to rationalize or justify your need or want. But, step back and ask yourself often: Is this a bunch of bull? In the end, we are all our own worst enemies – I didn’t come up with that phrase on my own, but I will give credit to the anonymous wise man that said it. I really don’t know how many original ideas there are out there, but, certainly, we each have our own unique perspective on this thing we call life, so why spend needless time and energy using others ideas, thought’s and opinions?