Patent Law

"We are all plagiarists" [?]

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

We plagiarize all the time, by not giving due credit for an idea, method, style, or approach. It may be as simple as not putting a sentence in quotation marks or saying "I told you so" when it wasn´t you who "said so" initially at all. Most professional plagiarizers get by with it and feel no guilt because some money has passed hands. Preachers do this most often. They will purchase a yearly program of sermons and allow the congregation to believe that the messages were from the Spirit. I myself have been guilty of taking an old work that I like and redoing it, or expounding on an already developed idea. We are all guilty but we justify it in many different ways. Even books on writing, say on essays, advise beginners to take someone else´s work, and expand it, and develop it in their own words. No one would call this plagiarism, but the foundational thought is not original, or the outline, and we´re not told to give credit to anyone else, so there is an element of dishonesty, but it has been cleaned up a bit, enough to pass a given standard anyway. I had a teacher tell me once that "if you copy from one author it is plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it is research." Of course it was said in jest, but it reveals an underlying element that we just laugh at, brush aside, ignore, or justify some way.

IPBiz observes that merely because we stand on the shoulders of giants does NOT mean we are all plagiarists (or copyists or noninventors or infringers or ...) Imagine a world governed by the pronouncement of the Harvard Business Review: Plagiarize with Pride!

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 02, 2008 (boomark / email).