Why is plagiarism bad?

One curious feature of both academia and journalism is that copying without attribution something written by somebody else that is correct is a far worse sin than publishing something that is one’s own work but entirely wrong. Yet from the point-of-view of the reader, which is the larger problem? Many of us rely heavily on the reporting and research of others in forming our views, and an erroneous fact has much more serious consequences for the soundness of our opinions than a mistaken attribution.

These strong norms against plagiarism, as Richard Posner argues in his The Little Book of Plagiarism, are a modern phenomenon, with great writers like Shakespeare freely copying from others, though often improving on the original in the process. In his time, there were pragmatic reasons for plagiarism. When plays were censored it was safer to re-use old material than to create new words that might be censored. Also, without modern mass production of cultural works copying brought ideas to wider audiences.

Posner sees the rise of individualism as important: ‘each of us thinks that our own contribution to society is unique, and so deserves public recognition, which plagiarism clouds.’ This has potential economic consequences, as authors (as I noted earlier in the week) become brands. The original author may be disadvantaged in selling his or her work by those using their words and gaining sales instead; the plagiarist may create a false brand, which consumers cannot rely on when considering whether to buy their subsequent works.

But clearly it isn’t just about the money. There is outrage surrounding plagiarism even when it has no financial consequences. And it doesn’t really have much to do with protecting consumers, who may be only vaguely aware of the author’s identity when, for example, reading newspapers and magazines or watching a TV show. It has far more to do with the pride of authors in wanting to take credit for their work, and in our interest in character – if plagiarists deceive us about authorship, can we trust them at all? (though this matters less with fiction than non-fiction).

Plagiarism by students has spawned a whole plagiarism detection industry to which, Posner says, commercial publishers do not yet typically submit their authors’ manuscripts, despite some high profile instances of published plagiarism. Yet the potentially very large number of people who read commercially-published works must serve as a substantial deterrent to authors, a deterrent that students did not face before plagiarism-detection software. Plagiarism in essays read by only one or two markers had a reasonable chance of going undetected, creating an incentive to commit it.

But it is also the case that social norms differ between students and authors. Authors usually want to be original; copying someone else is admitting defeat on that quality, at least to oneself. Students rarely worry about originality, they just want to get better marks than they would if they wrote the essay entirely in their own words (rather pathetically, most of the instances of plagiarism I found when I marked student essays were of other weak students, so the plagiarist would have received a low mark even if it had been their own work). Since virtually all students want to get better marks, it’s easy to see how other students could at least see plagiarism as an ‘understandable’ transgression, and not react as strongly against it as academics typically do.

Plagiarism among students is actually quite different from plagiarism committed by published writers. Few people expect originality from students; what markers are looking for in student essays is understanding, and one sign of understanding is for them to be able to express ideas in their own words. But an act of plagiarism doesn’t actually prove that they don’t understand the ideas or have misled the marker as to their degree of understanding. It could just mean that they are lazy or that their language skills don’t match those of the author they are copying or meet the expectations placed on them (this is an issue with students whose English is less than fluent). I can’t see any alternative to the rules banning plagiarism, but in some cases the punishment – usually a zero mark for the piece of work in question when I was a tutor, but even more severe elsewhere – may be disproportionate to the actual wrong done.

Posner’s book – or rather essay in hardcover (an idea presumably copied from the best-selling On Bullshit) – is a good overview of the issues, mostly relating to authors and academics but also with some discussion of students. A must-have for those interested in the complicated issues surrounding copying others. Everyone who writes builds on other writers to some degree, and the boundaries between what is and what is not acceptable copying or imitation are not always clear.