Plaig: it’s not about the copying, it’s about the lack of attribution

I think most of you understand this one already but there still seems to be some confusion on how plagiarism works, so here goes . . .

Basbøll links to a twitter feed by Adam Kotsko, a scholar of religion who’s written about the work of controversial philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Kotsko appears to be annoyed when people like Basbøll draw attention to Zizek’s instances of plagiarism (or, as Kotsko puts it, “passages that can be technically construed as plagiarism”).

In writing about plagiarism, Kotsko makes what I consider to be an error, which is to think that the problem people have with plagiarism is its repetition. For example, Kotsko writes, “Creating slightly different versions of the same thing for different audiences is not a crime.” But that’s not the point. Plagiarism is copying without attribution. There’s no problem with copying; the problem is with hiding the source. See our article, “To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime,” for further discussion of this point.

We’ve discussed all this many times before (just search this blog for plagiarism) but, from Kotsko’s posts, it seems the message has not completely got out there, so I thought I’d try again.

P.S. Speaking of Zizek, I continue to find this quote from Fredric Jameson to be insightful.

4 thoughts on “Plaig: it’s not about the copying, it’s about the lack of attribution

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