Net Could Forge Era Of Guiltless Plagiarism - Researcher
By Kevin Featherly, Newsbytes ; MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, 18 Oct 2001, 5:36 PM CST
New notions formed by the ease of copying digital content threaten over time to plunge creative people - particularly writers - into a plagiaristic morass that they might not even recognize is wrong.
So says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C., who presented her ideas during a panel on intellectual property during the Internet Research 2.0 conference last week, held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Baron presented views based on her own research. In particular, the professor told an audience mainly comprising other academics, she worries that some teachers - deluged by assignment papers that are little more than forgeries of other people's writing - are beginning themselves to see digitally induced plagiarism as simply a sign of the times. If so, they will fail to discourage it, Baron said. Or worse, they will actively encourage it.
It's clear from her research, the professor said, that many teens express opinions indicating that to copy other people's work in order to get an school assignment done is OK, because it's so easy to do.
But it's not OK, says Baron. And if students adapt that kind of mentality while only doing mere schoolwork, there is little doubt they will take those beliefs with them into adulthood and continue to operate as though there is nothing wrong with copying copyrighted content. This is the attitude that engenders the kind of piracy-is-OK ethos of the Napster generation, she said. But, particularly for writers, it also threatens to eat away at the very notion of originality, she said, a problem that could, extended fully, dull the intellect of the entire culture.
"We lose the ability to write independently, we lose the believe in the need for originality in at least some authors," she said. "We lose a stake in what we are writing. We lose any kind of commitment to any kind of appropriate writing mechanics. And we lose our ability to distinguish between what's an appropriate analogy and what isn't."
Baron's presentation weaved through a lot of fairly arcane history about how society has framed notions of original research, original art, and original writing. In the Middle Ages and up through the enlightenment, for instance, it was the job of the educated person to memorize large passages of classical literature from the likes of Cicero and Aristotle, and to refer back to those in their own writing. Even at the time of the American Revolution, such figures as Thomas Jefferson routinely referred back to classical Greek writing. And while Jefferson, for one, always attributed his sources, attribution in reality was not needed, because the passages were so familiar to so many, that there was no danger of anyone mistaking the source.
However, the classics gradually faded from the cultural memory, and research papers and other forms of writing rely on attribution when previously authored material is reused. When the Internet rolled around, even that requirement loosened, and students - and other writers - used the simple computer mechanism of cut-and-paste to inject wholesale copied writing directly into their own work, putting their name on top of it, and calling it original material.
The practice became so widespread that one theorist, Rebecca Howard, came to call it "patch writing," which Howard defined as "copying from a source text and deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another." This, Howard suggests in a 1999 book, is perfectly acceptable. She compares it with the behavior of the scholars of old, who borrowed liberally from the classical masters. Howard's is a new view that holds the writer is not plagiarizing, but is "collaborating with the text," Baron said.
"I absolutely don't agree (with Howard)," Baron told Newsbytes after her presentation. "She developed a notion of patch writing because she saw so many people cheating. Her solution was, rather than solve the problem, to instead decide it wasn't cheating and then to find a reason to defend that decision."
Said Baron: "The Internet is not the cause, but the Internet is making it just so simple to develop that kind of mindset."
---Napster: You Can't Be The Outlaw, I'm The Outlaw!---
In a related topic on the same panel, Internet Research 2.0 conference coordinator John Logie, a faculty member at University of Minnesota's Department of Rhetoric, described a research project he has just embarked on, aimed at examining the "outlaw" ethos that he says has been used intentionally to manipulate the legal copyright fight over the peer-to-peer song-swapping service Napster.
Logie, who is only starting his research, noted that several of the main characters trotted out before the public during the Napster copyright suits were the very picture of anti-establishment attitude. Even Napster's inventor, the twentysomething Shawn Fanning, pitched his software as a way to skirt the music industry and save fans money while creating an alternative community around the idea of free - albeit copyrighted - music. This attitude, Logie notes, shades the fact that Fanning is merely a kind of pitchman for a standard corporation - Napster Inc. - that has a CEO and a fairly standard manner of doing business, even if the product it traffics in arguably is illegal.
Logie theorizes that the two most public Napster combatants - the heavy metal band Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich, and rap star Dr. Dre - were handpicked by the music industry precisely because they, too, represent an outlaw ethos.
"What I'm arriving at is, because Fanning was the voice of Napster, they needed to send anti-establishment out to battle anti-establishment," Logie said. "They needed to fight fire with fire."
Logie pointed to some of the irony of using Ulrich and Dre as model of the high moral ground; it might have made more sense to push someone like Billy Joel out front of the judges and politicians, he said. Ulrich, after all, is the member of a band whose first album was titled, "Kill 'em All," Logie pointed out, hardly your average morality monger's central thesis. And Dre, like many rap artists, often engages in the legally questionable practice of "sampling" others' music or soundtrack work and inserting it into his own. By sampling a snippet of the most recent "Star Wars" film on his latest album, for instance, Dre has gotten himself in hot water with filmmaker George Lucas.
"On the one hand, " Logie said, "each of these groups has benefited from an outlaw ethos - that is part of their sales pitch. But on the other side, they are petitioning the courts as litigants in ways that directly counter their public personae. And that is what I'll be pursuing as I continue this project."
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