PLAGIARISM IS THEFT

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Just as the internet makes it easier for people to plagiarise, the internet also makes it easier to detect plagiarism. Google is brilliant at spotting plagiarism - just search for the offending phrase in quotation marks and Google often comes up with the original source. Google was my friend as a university lecturer marking student essays.

As a lecturer, I was constantly on guard to detect plagiarism. Before the internet, my cues that a student was plagiarising was a different style of writing within an essay, though that in itself wasn't damning and, moreover, me remembering the words that the student was writing wasn't their own words. The latter method was far from foolproof as my memory was limited.

To charge a student of plagiarism, which is a serious academic offence often leading to being kicked off a degree, meant that the onus was on me to prove plagiarism. Never easy. But plagiarism, passing off someone else's words as your own words, is blatant cheating. Often 'friends' of the plagiarising student would tip lecturers off that a student was plagiarising.

Since the internet, proof became easier to find. Students now have to submit their written work online, which is then subject to anti-plagiarism software. Given that most academic publications are now digitally published, it's very difficult for a student to pass off an academic's published work as their own work.

But even in the internet age, plagiarism still happens, Students, especially rich students, would pay others, usually other students, to write their essays for them. Student essay mills proliferated. Anti-plagiarism software was quite useless in picking up that plagiarism. And anti-plagiarism software is quite useless at picking up students who submit AI-generated essays.

Universities are in a bind, they perhaps want to encourage students to use AI in their studies but they certainly don't want their students to submit AI-written work for assessment. I suspect universities will move away from written essays towards examinations. Exams are more AI-proof than essays.

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I've just read a fascinating review of a book about plagiarism, Roger Kreuz's Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots. As you can tell from the book title, plagiarism has a long history. In the world of literature, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare have long been accused of plagiarism. Charles Dickens was reportedly incensed by the many writers churning out imitations of his works.

In the world of politics, Joe Biden made a speech plagiarised from a speech originally given by a British politician, Neil Kinnock. Melania Trump plagiarised a speech first given by Michelle Obama.

In the world of music, George Harrison was done for plagiarism with his My Sweet Lord song in a 1976 court case in America. In 2015, Marvin Gaye's estate was awarded $7.3 million in damages from Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Ed Sheeran has been accused of plagiarism a few times, but so far courts have cleared him of plagiarism.

Given that there's a finite number of musical notes that can be played in whatever order and given that musicians are understandably influenced by others, it's no surprise plagiarism is a vexed issue in the musical world. I'm a bit more relaxed about musical plagiarism than plagiarism of the written or spoken word.

The difference between plagiarism and influence is a very fuzzy distinction. If, for example, I was to blog about democracy, I'd just shoot from the hip without probably citing sources because I've digested many over a long period of time; it would be different if I was writing a piece of academic work. However, I would never, at least knowingly, pass off someone else's words as my words and I always try to credit specific sources for my ideas and arguments when blogging. Plagiarism is intellectual theft.

The two most stupid cases of plagiarism I've come across involved a PhD student and a couple on this site, both plagiarised my words. The PhD student cited my words in his PhD thesis, without quotation marks and without reference. I was his examiner, something he had advance warning of. Stupid. His plagiarism, however, gave me a dilemma. If I had flagged up plagiarism in my examiner's report, this would have triggered disciplinary proceedings (I could live with that as I had a zero-tolerance approach to plagiarism). But because the PhD student was also a serving police officer, such disciplinary proceedings if proven would have led to his dismissal from London's Metropolitan Police. Rightly or wrongly, I decided to flag up bad referencing rather than plagiarism in my examiner's report. I saw no need for double punishment, no PhD and no job. No PhD was a suitably just punishment.

Many years ago on this site when I was a swinging couple, I came across a couple who copied our profile as their profile. It's a compliment in one sense, but I mailed asking them to take it down. To their credit, they did. Strictly speaking, they didn't have to because the site has intellectual copyright of words posted on this site. Not that the site cares about copyright. Just think how images of porn get taken down because they contain a website address or copyright credentials. But if such images of porn don't contain such information, the site allows the images to stick. But the site still doesn't own the copyright of such images.

Linked to all this, though the site claims copyright of what's posted here, bloggers who post original content own copyright of their content. Members sign a license agreement with the site in that the site can do whatever it likes with their content, and from where I'm standing, the site doesn't do much with the content, another business opportunity lost! But members still own their content though they don't have total control over how their content is used.

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