Richard Posner is an appellate judge and also a lecturer at the University of Chicago. In The Little Book of Plagiarism gives a quick 100-page tour of the historical and legal aspects of an issue that was more complicated than I thought: plagiarism. Coming from the legal world, there’s plenty of critical wordplay here, defining and refining what exactly plagiarism is and how it relates to copyright infringement, in particular.
The definition that Posner works towards in the first half of the book is most simply described as “fraudulent copying,” which he supposes isn’t always a legal misstep (or shouldn’t always be, anyway). But it’s certainly a grievous ethical lapse. One interesting aspect of plagiarism that I hadn’t thought about is trying to suss out exactly who the “victim” is. With copyright violations, the victim is simply the author whose words were stolen and who lost recognition for or control their work. With plagiarism, the works of competing, legitimate authors are put at a disadvantage, and the reader is also misled. The plagiarist gets an unfair leg up on the competition and fools the audience.
A couple other items of note are Posner’s tangential comments on universities and scholarship: “Scholars are self-selected into an activity that requires them to write, although not to write well (which means, however, that good writing is not highly valued in most scholarly fields).” Just like any other humans, it’s plausible that some professors don’t particularly worry about writing really, really well. I hadn’t thought about that before, though I’ve certainly read my share of bad scholarly writing. (And written it as well, I’m sure… but I tried).
History offers us a few obvious examples of flagrant, unapologetic borrowers: Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr., T.S. Eliot, etc. Posner’s take on the issue: “We need to distinguish between “originality” and “creativity,” stripping the former of the normative overtones that rightly attend the latter.” The source material may be old, but it’s what you can do with it that counts. There’s an object lesson here, I think. One that relieves a bit of the creative’s burden. You don’t have to be the first, just do it well.
Mark Larson 