Jeffrey Roth’s story about plagiarism and theft of intellectual property struck home with me because I have a little experience in that area, having been victimized a few years back by someone who copied one of my columns, put his name on it and passed it off as his own.
Unless you write for a living, plagiarism probably isn’t something you’ll encounter. But as Roth notes in his story, getting caught can be devastating for students and for parents who are paying the bill for college.
In my case, it was early in 2012 when an email arrived in my in box. It looked like spam, came from someone I had never heard of and included links to lots of different stories and columns from people across the country.
I was about to delete it when, as I scanned through, I noticed there was a link to a column I had written and, right under that, a link to another column with the same headline by a different writer. The email had come from a man named Dave Fox, who said that he was a freelance humor and travel writer who was living in Singapore. He had been looking up some of his old work for a blog he was putting together, and was surprised when some of his columns popped up with the byline of a guy named Jon Flatland.
Flatland was a 28-year veteran of the newspaper industry, and he likely would still be employed at the weekly Blooming Prairie Times as their managing editor if not for Fox outing him as a serial plagiarist.
The Poynter Institute, an educational enterprise for working journalists, said at the time that Flatland “ranks high on the list of the worst newspaper plagiarists ever.”
Outside the media, the problem is worse. I know teachers who complain about their students cutting and pasting from Internet searches and submitting it as their original work. And there is this overwhelming attitude everywhere that anything on the Internet is just there, free for the taking.
Let’s take that to extremes.
I recently downloaded a Stephen King novel. Great book. Perhaps I should just copy it, put my name on it and start selling it.
Ludicrous? Of course.
Yet that is what is happening, albeit in smaller bites, wherever there are people with Internet access who are tasked with completing a project or paper.
Back in 2012, when people asked how I felt to have my work stolen, I told them it was like spending months cultivating a beautiful potted flower garden in my front yard, only to wake up one morning and find the pots all carefully arranged in the neighbor’s yard across the street.
It’s like the feeling you get when you discuss a great idea with a fellow employee over the water cooler, only to have that employee take the idea to the boss and claim credit for it.
At the end of the day, the hype about plagiarism often masks the real issue – each culprit’s lack of integrity.
Flatland and scores more like him lack integrity.
We shouldn’t need search engines to detect plagiarism. The solution should be a simple one: honest people who tap the words or ideas of others should acknowledge that the work is not their own.
Jim Lee
Jim is a copy editor and a writer for Carroll Magazine.
