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The CopyCat Syndrome: Plagiarists at Work

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The CopyCat Syndrome: Plagiarists at Work

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Plagiarists at work.

We may know pornography when we see it, but the same can't be said of plagiarism. Ever since it was revealed last month that several passages in Ian McEwan's Atonement closely resemble sections of Lucilla Andrews' World War II memoir, No Time For Romance, critics have debated whether the similarities constitute wholesale " plagiarism" or mere literary " discourtesy." The one thing everyone does agree on, apparently, is the necessity of policing plagiarism, whatever it may be. A partial list of authors recently accused (rightly or wrongly) includes Dan Brown, Yann Martel, Kaavya Viswanathan, J.K. Rowling, playwright Bryony Lavery, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Alan Dershowitz. In an op-ed in early 2003, Condoleezza Rice even cited Saddam Hussein's habitual plagiarism as evidence of the leader's fundamental treachery.

Our distaste for plagiarism is usually framed in terms of our affection for originality. "We prize originality above everything and place a high value on novelty of expression," Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer, examining the outcry over McEwan. In The Little Book of Plagiarism, an engaging new study of the concept, law professor and Judge Richard A. Posner attributes today's "increasing attention" to plagiarism largely to a "cult of originality" first shaped by the Romantics-who venerated individual genius-and further intensified by a 21 st-century modern market economy that values novelty in its "expressive works." Obviously, originality does have something to do with all the fuss: Most of us expect writers-especially novelists and poets-to have a distinctive voice and literary style. We carve out exceptions for writers like Shakespeare-a plagiarist by modern-day standards-because they are creative in their use of borrowed material; such copying isn't "slavish" but inventive, or, as Posner puts it, "The imitation is producing value." Those who don't recontextualize borrowed work-like Kaavya Viswanathan-we censure.

But the rhetoric of creative originality doesn't fully explain our preoccupation with footnoting and credit-or the recent accusations against Dershowitz, Goodwin, and Ambrose. The historians were attacked for using language from other historians-in Ambrose's case, from a writer he cited in the book's notes-without quotation marks. Dershowitz was accused in 2003 by Norman Finkelstein of "fraud, falsification, plagiarism" for having borrowed many of the citations in The Case For Israel directly from another contemporary book-in other words, for using them without having checked the primary sources himself. (As evidence, Finkelstein pointed to Dershowitz's verbatim reproduction of errors in citation made by the original author, Joan Peters.) Judging by the "originality" standard, what Dershowitz did hardly seems like plagiarism. He did not copy Peters' actual words or pass the quoted authors' works off as his own; he just took a shortcut. In the case of Kearns, adding quotation marks to the passages she had borrowed wouldn't have made her work more original. It just would have given credit where credit was due.

These examples help bring a crucial issue of plagiarism into focus. Behind the talk of originality lurks another preoccupation, less plainly voiced: a concern about the just distribution of labor. In plenty of instances of so-called plagiarism, what bothers us isn't so much a lack of originality as the fact that the plagiarizer has stolen someone else's work -the time it took to write the words or do the necessary research. The cribbed student essay-which Posner views as a particularly insidious form of plagiarism, committed by approximately one-third of high-school and college students-isn't an academic crime because a C student has tried to pass himself as a Matthew Arnold in the making. It's an academic crime because the student who buys his thesis from a paper mill has shirked the labor that his fellow students actually perform.

In fact, labor and plagiarism were entwined from the start. The word derives from the Latin plagiarius, referring to "kidnapper." Around the first century A.D., Roman satirist Martial gave us its modern sense when he wrote an epigram complaining that another man (whom he labeled a "plagiarius") had kidnapped his writings (which he metaphorically labeled his slaves) and was passing them off as his own. What had been a metaphor for a slave-stealer-someone who got labor for free-became a symbolic expression for the theft of words. As Glenn Reynolds and Peter Morgan observed in a 2002 essay, the ancients who gave us the notion of plagiarism didn't object to creative imitation. On the contrary, they encouraged it, knowing that there are only a limited number of good ideas in the world: "Imitation was bad only when it was disguised, or a symptom of laziness. It was not denounced simply on grounds of being 'unoriginal.' " And in his excellent book Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism, Thomas Mallon notes that writers didn't care about plagiarism much "until they thought of writing as their trade."

It may be less obvious that issues of labor lurk behind our anxieties when it comes to fiction. But even the McEwan affair, when you think about it, boils down to a concern that he cut corners at someone else's expense. At this juncture, McEwan has published roughly a dozen works of fiction, most of them critically acclaimed, and is revered for his distinctive prose style. In the case of Atonement, it can hardly be said that the presence of two cribbed passages, comprising a few hundred words, profoundly alters our perception of McEwan's overall literary "originality." For one thing, Atonement is hundreds of pages long. For another, McEwan didn't exactly hide his borrowing: Andrews is acknowledged in the book. Why, exactly, do we care if a few sentences resemble a historical source? And what do we think would be gained from his having painstakingly substituted different words from those Andrews had used? The answer, clearly, has to do with work; it seems unfair that Andrews had to sit at her desk and painstakingly consider how to describe cleaning a soldier's wounds, while McEwan could merely sit down and effectively copy out her sentences, moving on to the rest of his story (while getting paid more than she did, presumably).

Posner may be right to connect our obsession with plagiarism to the rise of a market economy that values individualism in cultural works. But perhaps it also stems from a collision of contemporary ideas about what accomplishment really is: the result of effortless gifts, or the fruition of hard labor? Americans are fond of the myth of hard work. As preternaturally gifted distance runner Steve Prefontaine puts it in the 1998 biopic Without Limits, "Talent is a myth." And recent studies have shown that the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall is based in quantifiable fact: The top tier of 20-year-old violinists, it turns out, practiced on average 2,500 hours more than violinists the next rank down. Yet contemporary culture pays quite a lot of lip service to the myth of innate talent, wildly overestimating, for instance, the contributions of single employees to companies.

Clearly, our post-Romantic awe at individual talent still lives on. But it is also clear, as Posner points out, that we don't actually believe art must be sui generis to be great. Plenty of good Hollywood movies, to take just one example, are highly imitative. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed new film The Departed is a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. * But critics didn't hold that against Scorsese; after all, he did the work of translating the film to a contemporary Boston setting. (This makes the film different from its predecessor, but hardly "original.") What really bothers us about plagiarism isn't the notion of influence itself, but the notion that a piece of writing has been effortless for the thief in question. Instead of worrying whether writers who borrow from other artists are fakers, perhaps we should be asking if they're slackers. It might make it easier to decide which kinds of influence to condone and which to condemn.

Correction, Jan. 11, 2006: This sentence originally referred to the "2002 Taiwanese film Infernal Affairs." In fact, the film was made in Hong Kong.

Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor. She was previously an editor at the New Yorker. The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother's death, is now out in paperback.

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Plagiarists at work. We may know pornography when we see it, but the same can't be said of plagiarism. Ever since it was revealed last month that several passages in Ian McEwan's Atonement closely resemble sections of Lucilla Andrews' World War II memoir, No Time For Romance, critics have debated whether the similarities constitute wholesale " plagiarism" or mere literary " discourtesy."

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Writer's Web_ Avoiding Cliches in Writing

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Happiness is almost a national obsession these days. The self-help shelves of bookstores are filled with entries that promise to help you find or achieve happiness. The field of positive psychology has highlighted the importance of subjective well-being, which is the general sense people have of their good feelings and life satisfaction. Businesses are focused on the idea that happy employees are productive employees and that the goal of most businesses is to surprise and delight consumers.

In this context, we rarely think about what the word happy really means. If you are a native speaker of English, then you probably assume that you know what it means to be happy. You probably also assume that people around the world share a similar idea of what it means to be happy (though they may differ in what makes them happy). Finally, you probably believe that the general concept of happiness has been similar for humans for eons (though, again, the particular things that might have made people happy a few thousand years ago are not the same as the things that make people happy now).

A fascinating paper by Shigehiro Oishi, Jesse Graham, Selin Kesebir, and Iolanda Costa Galinha in the May, 2013 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explores what it means to be happy both across cultures/languages and over time within the United States.

This work demonstrates that there are big differences across cultures in what the term happiness means. There has also been a drift in the meaning of happiness for Americans over the past 200 years.

To explore the meaning of the term happy, the researchers collected the term (or sometimes terms) for happiness that are used in 30 different countries. Many of these countries represented different languages (French in France, Chinese in China), but there were several countries in which there was a common language (English is spoken in both Australia and the United States; Spanish is spoken in Argentina, Ecuador, and Spain). They got these terms from informants who provided the best word (or words) used to describe the concept of happiness. The researchers also provided their sense of the most authoritative dictionary in that country.

Research assistants than explored aspects of the meaning of the words for happiness across languages.

A striking observation is that in 24 of the 30 countries, there was a strong element of luck associated with the meaning of the term happiness. In English used in the United States, there is minor use of the term to mean luck ("That was a happy accident."), but generally happiness in the US refers to an individual emotional state. Other countries also had a component of the meaning of happiness that referred to the positive emotional state.

Another interesting observation from this analysis was that the further countries are from the equator, the more that the luck aspect of happiness emerges. The authors speculate that in colder climates, the environmental conditions play a bigger role in success and well-being than in milder climates.

Two other analyses examined changes in the use of the term happy in English over the past few hundred years. One analyses demonstrated that the use of the words happy and happiness in State of the Union addresses by US presidents has declined over the years. In addition, there has been a shift. In the 1800s, when Presidents talked about happiness, they were referring to luck and prosperity. By the mid-to-late 1900s, though when Presidents talked about happiness, they were referring to the positive emotion of satisfaction.

A second analysis looked at how often books in the United States talked about a happy nation versus a happy person. That is, if happiness is a circumstance associated with luck and prosperity, then we should talk about it in reference to groups like the country. If happiness is an internal emotional state, then we should talk about it related mostly to people.

To explore this question, the researchers searched for the phrases happy nation and happy person in the books in English books published in the United States in the Google digital database between 1800 and 2008.

In 1800, people were much more likely to talk about a happy nation than a happy person. The number of references to a happy nation decreased steadily throughout the 1800s, and by 1900, it was relatively rare. Starting in about 1925, there was an uptick in the use of the term happy person.

There are two interesting aspects to these data analyses. First, there has been a shift in the US from a focus on happiness as a state that is caused from the outside through luck and prosperity to an internal emotional state that is under the control of the person. Second, the view that happiness involves strong elements of external forces like luck is still common around the world, even if it is not common in the United States.

This issue is important, because much of the scientific world uses English as the basis for describing key psychological states and processes. If English is a little quirky in the way that it uses one of these terms, that can have a profound influence on what science believes it should be studying.

Finally, even if you are not a scientist, it is important to realize that there are many components to happiness. If you are feeling sad, then you may be prone to focus on what is wrong with you that makes you unhappy. When you realize the role that life situations play in happiness, though, it helps you to see how changing your environment can also change your outlook on life.

Follow me on Twitter.

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Check out my books Smart Thinking and Habits of Leadership

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Happiness is almost a national obsession these days. The self-help shelves of bookstores are filled with entries that promise to help you find or achieve happiness. The field of positive psychology has highlighted the importance of subjective well-being, which is the general sense people have of their good feelings and life satisfaction.

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Steps to Creating a Definition Argument.docx

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What is the Actual Definition of a Bad Father?

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What is the Actual Definition of a Bad Father?

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This year, a judge in Oklahoma found a convicted child sex offender a "good enough" father to award him sole custody of his six-year-old daughter. In Australia, a man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping and sexually assaulting his young daughter from the age of five was let out on a "good behaviour" bond. In Ireland, a 52-year-old man was given a suspended sentence after being convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl. The judge ruled that jailing a convicted child rapist would cause serious hardship to his current family.

Andrew Parsons was labelled a "good father". Parsons was convicted of the brutal murder of his ex-wife Janee at Oxford Crown Court. He stalked Janee and then stabbed her to death in front of their young son but, somehow, he is still a "good father". Parsons' "jealous rage" as his ex-wife ended their marriage does not prevent him from being a labelled a "good" father by a judge. Parson's QC went so far as to suggest that Parsons' "loved his wife, perhaps too much" as if it is normal to murder someone you love.

These are four cases where violent men have been considered "good enough" fathers by the courts. Labelling these cases as aberrations is to wilfully ignore both structural misogyny and the pattern of male violence in our culture. It serves only to normalise male violence.

So, when did we change the definition of 'good father' to include men who murder the mother of their children? When did it begin to include men who commit murder in front of their children? When did it begin to include men who are convicted of child sexual abuse? When did we extend the term "good" to fathers who have no contact with their children?

When did being a 'good father' limit criminal responsibility?

I wrote an article for Father's Day asking exactly what makes a 'good father'. I claimed that men who are violent or who refuse to financially or emotionally support their children aren't "good" fathers. Unsurprisingly, I have received a lot of sexist abuse about my article, particularly from men angry at my suggestion that the current definition of a 'good father' is so low as to be completely pointless. When the definition of a "good father" includes a man who refuses to financially support his children to men who commit domestic violence, I have to wonder what the definition of a bad father is?

What does a man have to do to be labelled a bad father? If a conviction for child rape isn't enough, what is?

More importantly, why aren't more men angry about this? Why aren't more fathers writing complaint letters every time the media claims that a child rapist is a good enough father?

Why aren't men challenging this patriarchal theory, which claims that a man is "good enough" as long as he sends a birthday card once a year? There are millions of good fathers across the world, so where are they? Why aren't they angry?

Why was the list that I wrote defining "good fathers" so controversial? What are we doing to our children when we consider both our children and their mothers possessions? A woman has a right to end a relationship when she chooses to without being murdered. A child has the right to be raised by adults who are not violent; adults that will not harm them or their mother.

What are we doing to our children when the following isn't sufficient reason to deny access:

Domestic violence makes you a bad father.
Abusing your partner in front of your children is child abuse.

Good fathers do not kill the mother of their children.

Violent men who assault or murder their partners do not deserve contact with their children.

Good fathers do not murder their children to punish the children's mother.

If the definition of a "good father" includes men who murder the mother of their children, what is the definition of a bad father?

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What Is The Actual Definition Of A Bad Father?

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This year, a judge in Oklahoma found a convicted child sex offender a "good enough" father to award him sole custody of his six-year-old daughter. In Australia, a man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping and sexually assaulting his young daughter from the age of five was let out on a "good behaviour" bond.

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Today's Fourth of July holiday, our country's birthday, marks a new beginning for undocumented Americans like me.

Last month, TIME magazine featured an unprecedented photograph of 36 undocumented young people, myself included, on the cover of its U.S. and international editions. "We are Americans," the headline declared. "Just not legally." Shortly after, President Obama, in the most significant step in the fight for immigrant rights since President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, issued a directive to stop the deportation of an estimated 1 million DREAM Act-eligible undocumented youth and welcome them to our workforce. America, in turn, embraced 1 million dreams. And in last week's Supreme Court decision on Arizona's immigration law, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion for the highest court in the land: "As a general rule, it is not a crime for a movable alien to remain in the United States."

As we celebrate America's Independence Day -- as we explore what it means to be American on the most American of all days -- I also celebrate my independence from the word "illegal."

Academics and lawyers will be quick to point out that I, in fact, was never a "criminal." Being in the U.S. without authorization is not a crime, but rather a civil offense for the country's estimated 12 million undocumented residents. Yet for too long, the rhetoric around immigration has been shrouded in and synonymous with criminality. As a cable news producer on Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" tells a colleague in the show's most recent episode, we've grown accustomed to talking about human beings as if "we're talking about scraping gum off our shoes."

"These people chose to take a huge risk to become Americans," the producer notes, "and they deserve a better descriptor than 'illegals.'"

To me, what it means to be an American goes beyond your place of birth or the documents you have, back to when throngs of Irish, Italian and Eastern Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of a better life, no papers asked. What it means to be an American is less about who you are than what you are about-- how you live your life, how you contribute to this country, how you pledge allegiance to a flag hoping and praying it will make room for you. What it means to be an American is in the hearts of the people who, in their struggles and heartaches, in their joys and triumphs, fight for America and fight to be American every day.

A few weeks after I "came out" in June 2011 about my undocumented status in an essay in the New York Times Magazine, Washington state revoked my driver's license. Among the first people to reach out to me was Aaron Sorkin. I've interviewed Sorkin before. He told me he was working on a new show about a cable news program, and that the second episode is set on the day Gov. Jan Brewer signed the Arizona immigration bill into law. He asked for my thoughts on immigration. In an email later, I told him about the first time I watched one of his films. It was 1997, not too long after I discovered that I didn't have the proper documents to live in America. I was watching "The American President," a movie starring Michael Douglas, and toward the end of the film, Douglas, as the president, says: "America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight." I was 16, lost and disoriented, and I told Sorkin that hearing those words helped me realize that I had to fight -- that America was a fight and that America had to be earned.

Undocumented Americans, aspiring citizens like me, have been fighting and will continue to fight for this country we call home. And, as more and more undocumented Americans and the people who support us -- the Good Samaritans in our lives, the teachers, pastors, neighbors and friends who make up our underground railroad -- "come out" and tell our stories, America's view of immigration and the nature of citizenship itself grows increasingly more complex and nuanced. It becomes about human beings.

Together with a small group of friends, I founded a campaign called Define American, which seeks to elevate conversation on immigration. And elevating and broadening the conversation means engaging different types of audiences from all walks of life. After appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor" last month, I received an email from Dennis Murphy of Omaha, Nebraska. The email reads:

"Mr. Vargas:

As founder and former state chairman of the Nebraska Minutemen, now merged with the Nebraska Tea Party, I was positively impressed by your interview with Bill O'Reilly. If I understand your situation correctly, you [were] brought into the United States by your parents when you were a young child, and they chose for whatever reason to do so in a fashion that avoided our immigration law. You now refer to yourself in your blog as "an undocumented American," which I believe is a fair and accurate assessment."

Thank you, Mr. Murphy, for considering me one of your fellow Americans. Let's keep the conversation going. Let's keep exploring what it means to be an American.
WATCH: Jose Antonio Vargas and others define 'American':

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Today's Fourth of July holiday, our country's birthday, marks a new beginning for undocumented Americans like me. Last month, TIME magazine featured an unprecedented photograph of 36 undocumented young people, myself included, on the cover of its U.S. and international editions. "We are Americans," the headline declared. "Just not legally."

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Friends from our childhood or adolescence are special, no matter how much time has elapsed between visits. These compelling connections are the result of shared roots during the formative years. Our childhood friends and teenage sweethearts experienced with us all the wonderful, horrible, boring, and embarrassing moments that helped to make us who we are today.

Yet, when children are young, parents may regard these relationships as insignificant. If the family must move to a new community and the children's close friends must be left behind, so what? They will make new friends, the parents assure them. But, is a friend as interchangeable as a new toy for an old one, or is there more to friendship than that? Why are we so elated to rediscover long lost friends in our adult years if, as some parents believe, they were so dispensable to us as children?

Even more belittled by many parents is a teenager's (or preteen's) love for a boyfriend or girlfriend. Adults refer to these relationships with demeaning language, calling them "just puppy love," and these romantic bonds are not taken seriously. Parents question the ability of teenagers to know what love is, yet they accept their teenagers' statements, "I love you, Mom & Dad," with full appreciation and at face value. If adults accept that teenagers can love parents truly, then shouldn't they also accept that teen romances are "real" love?

Recreational dating is relatively new. Teenagers many years ago married their first sweethearts right out of high school. These men and women of the World War II Generation married at younger ages than their Baby Boomer children or their Generation X or Millennial grandchildren. But education has become prolonged, so marriage is later.

The age of puberty, however, has dropped. Whatever the reasons for this, reaching puberty influences the age of first love and first sexual experience. It is rare now to marry a first love. Today's teenagers date not for mate selection but for fun. However, the first love experience is no less powerful than it was in the 1940's.

Adults who underestimate the strength of the bond-- or the impact of the loss -- of a first love may have forgotten what a blow it was when they lost their own first loves. They may even try to comfort teenagers with lighthearted lessons: a surprising number of men and women wrote to me to bitterly complain about parents who joked years ago, "Don't worry! Boyfriends/girlfriends are like buses... a new one comes along every ten minutes!" This was not helpful, and it was not funny. The loss of a first love can be so crushing to some teenagers that they become suicidal.

The pain of the breakup will subside with time, but the love may stay buried and dormant for decades. While most men and women find satisfying partners after first love breakups, there are adults who spend their married years aware that "something is missing." They continue to think about their lost first loves. Perhaps if they had married their first loves when they were younger, they tell me, they could have formed lasting and fulfilling marriages, but they will never know. These romances were interrupted - often by their parents' interference.

In my recent survey of 1600 people (who had never tried a reunion with a lost love), ages 18 to 92, 56% of the participants said they would not want to go back to their first loves, 19% were not sure -- but 25% said they would!

Even the adults who had no current interest in their first loves, including those who had only bitter memories, revealed that these early romances influenced their life-long attitudes about love, and even about themselves.

The longer I study lost loves and lost love reunions, the clearer it becomes to me how important young love really is. First love, young love, is indeed real love. This intense love does not come along every ten minutes. For some people, it may come only once in a lifetime.
Copyright 2010 by Nancy Kalish, Ph.D.
Revised 2013

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Friends from our childhood or adolescence are special, no matter how much time has elapsed between visits. These compelling connections are the result of shared roots during the formative years. Our childhood friends and teenage sweethearts experienced with us all the wonderful, horrible, boring, and embarrassing moments that helped to make us who we are today.

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What Is Cajun | Explore Lafayette Louisiana

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Lafayette's first known inhabitants were known to have populate a area where the Attakapa Indians once did in the 1700's. Learn more about Lafayette's history.