From the time I took on university teaching, I fought an uphill battle against plagiarism.
My attitude towards plagiarism has always been "WTF?" because I am a lover of words and that means I steal them all the time. There are many folks reading these words I have stolen from, but I try to follow the conventions of the trade about giving credit when I purloin from a place that can be cited.
Sometimes it seems fair to go even farther. Martha Ture and I had conversations spreading over years about what she came to call "marketocracy," government by unrestrained transnational capitalism because nation-states have lost the power to restrain it.
When Mike Gilbert and I wrote a series of articles about that, I dropped a footnote that referred not to a publication, but to a person, because I was swiping a word that only existed (ironically enough) as a corporate trademark, something Martha had not known. So we were not re-purposing the mark, but I was recognizing a handy term I had not created. Martha created it in the sense that I used it and I had a plain duty to create a paper trail that led to her by dropping that footnote.
What is so damn complicated, I always wondered, about not using words first published by others or, if you do, citing them?
Now we have a US Senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, an enthusiastic supporter of private property--which I would take to include intellectual property---caught repeatedly cribbing Wikipedia word for word in "his" speeches.
I did not wish to make a big deal of it. Chuckle and move on.
But Paul has responded that the whole deal is about footnoting "technicalities" and he did no wrong because when he described the plots of Gattaca and Stand and Deliver he mentioned the movies and so he was not stealing from those who wrote the screenplays.
http://fusion.net/...
No! No! No!
What he stole was plot summaries composed by movie buffs on Wikipedia and he stole them word for word. He loaded the blooming Wikipedia text into his TelePromTer!
I did not consider this a big deal.
This was a chuckle and move on.
But now I've got a US Senator contributing to the supposed mystery of plagiarism.
No! No! No!
If you use other people's words, say where you got them. There's no mystery.
When you use exact phrases constructed by others, enclose them in quotation marks, even when you have no footnotes, and mention the source. Even if you don't know the source, you disclaim credit for work you did not produce thusly:
"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it," is often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, but we know Mark Twain never met Rand Paul.