Updated 1/11/24
What is plagiarism?
Is plagiarism illegal?
How might plagiarism affect a typical professor?
How might plagiarism affect a typical student?
Some notorious cases of plagiarism:
- Claudine Gay and Neri Oxman
- Claudine Gay – former president of Harvard University
- Neri Oxman – former standout MIT professor
- Here’s what went down in roughly this order
- Gay was under attack from politicians
- Billionnaire, influencer & Harvard alum Bill Ackman demands her resignation
- Plagiarized passages were found in Gay’s writings
- Most but not all of the real authors think it isn’t serious
- Ackman hammers on the plagiarism discovery
- Gay resigns
- Media outlet “Business Insider” publishes Oxman plagiarism examples
- Ackman freaks out
- Threatens Business Insider
- Threatens also to check all MIT professors for plagiarism
- Why? Because Oxman is his wife!
- Ackman reveals himself to be … er, what, exactly?
- It turns out numerous Harvard students have been suspended for doing what Gay did
- The saga is continuing
- Paul McRory, a neurologist (physician and researcher)
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-Mccrory
- “For more than two decades, Paul McCrory has been the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally.” NY Times (paywalled, try internet disconnect)
- How many times: this links to this.
- April 28, 2022 update: cached, actual
- As of Aug. 2022: paywalled but
- He is known for influencing sports policies away from athlete safeguards
- What is AFL anyway
- Kaavya Viswanathan
and her book
and the sad thing that happened later
- Fareed Zakaria
A sampling
How did he bounce back?
“Renowned journalist Fareed Zakaria resigned from the Yale Corporation board after acknowledging that he had plagiarized a single paragraph in his TIME column on gun control. Instead of denying accusations or attacking the conservative media critics who surfaced the problem as bigots, Zakaria candidly admitted the error. He was reinstated in his roles at CNN and TIME and continues to be a highly regarded prolific print and TV commentator.” – J. Sonnenfeld, 2024, https://fortune.com/2024/01/10/yale-management-professor-harvard-board-failures-education-leadership-sonnenfeld/
A creative solution is proposed
Is that ethical?
- Plagiarism and more
Fabricated Bob Dylan quotes
- In the “Not plagiarism, but ...” department
- Faking it is bad, too: Stephen Glass, Clifford Irving; James Frey
(I liked the movie: “Shattered Glass“)
- Project idea: comparison of these cases
- Click for: search of recent scandals; Plagiarism Today site
- Popular musicians
a popular term project topic in this class
- Let me tell you what happened when I noticed that:
The CBS news site plagiarized a press release
It’s not hard to find more!
1. Google a search query like:
Harvard scientists discover
2. Find a Harvard press release or similar that’s got a bit of sizzle
3. Search on a quotable phrase from it
4. Finding plagiarism is like visiting a “pick your own” farm
Other considerations about plagiarism
Teaching computer ethics in an era of rampant plagiarism
The plagiarism problem (or not problem)
What happened when a student in this class plagiarized:
See: Teaching computer ethics in an era of rampant plagiarism
What do you think of that?
Important! Copyright and Plagiarism Differ!
- Copyright is a legal concept
- Plagiarism is not a legal concept
It is a proposed ethics rule
There is no law against it!
- Purpose of copyright:
1. Encourage IP creation by giving the creators rights to their IP
2. Encourage society to benefit from IP by restricting creator rights
- Why is this a tradeoff?
Computing often involves tradeoffs…
Speed vs. memory
Usability vs. power consumption
Etc.
Encouraging IP creation
Suppose you were the ruler of England in 1709
(Because that’s where the first copyright law began)
How might you encourage IP creation?
E.g. books (not movies, games, software, …)
Encouraging society to benefit
- How do copyright laws restrict society’s freedom to benefit from copyrighted IP?
Say you’re Queen Anne and the British parliament
Something needs to be done!
So you create the “Statute of Anne”
Statute of Anne
- The first copyright law
- Passed in 1710
- Gave authors rights for 14 years
They could renew for another term
- US as of 8/29/2022: life of author + 70 years
- What happened when a work’s copyright expires:
it become unprotected, public property
Comments
- Note the balance of author and public rights
- That’s the whole point!
- Protect the author, to encourage creation of IP
- Protect public right to reuse, so the IP generates value to society
The Statute of Anne “even in the 21st century is ‘frequently invoked by modern judges and academics as embodying the utilitarian underpinnings of copyright law'” – wikipedia, quoting I. Alexander, 2010, Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century, Hart Publishing, ISBN 978-1-84113-786-5.
An important question to consider:
Modern AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., suck in huge amounts of stuff on the web, much of it copyrighted. They then generate text based on mixing it all together. This is new legal territory: we need to know if it is a copyright violation or not.
- Should web content owners be compensated for allowing AIs to crawl their content and use it to help generate new text or new images?
- How should copyright rules adapt the principle of “Protect the author, to encourage creation of IP; and protect public right to reuse, so the IP generates value to society” to an era of AIs using copyrighted content to generate new text and images?
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IFSC 2200 Ethics in the Profession 