roachboy

there op opens onto two basic directions

1.) there's a kind of interesting question floating around just below the surface here concerning what exactly plagiarism is.
i don't think it's as obvious as you might imagine it to be.
against a simplistic understanding of the notion, i'll just paste up a quote that i have seen plagiarized again and again, and in some quite famous contexts:

now in academic-land, the notion of plagiarism is tied to three main factors:

1. it is a disciplinary notion advanced on undergraduates to cut them off from simply taking other people's work and foisting it off as their own---but this is context-contigent--the rationale is generally advanced as following from the educational process, that it is important to get students to work on their information organization/processing/critical thinking skills. as a functional thing in that context, i don't have a problem with the stricture. but that has nothing to do with principle.

2. within academic writing, the rationale is usually has something to do with the "republic of letters" and other such enlightenment bromides, but what it seems to me is really at the center of it is (a) symbolic capital accumulation in the context of a gift economy (no-one makes a whole lot of money at academic writing until you hit a considerable degree of celebrity--celebrity is contingent on the prior accumulation of symbolic capital)---so (b) professional hierarchies and (c) private property claims---which have everything to do with (d) the orientation of anglo-saxon copyright/intellectual property law.

the other main dimension of such claims has to do with transparency of information--by revealing the sources, you open up the argument to checking by other researchers. this would be the up side in principle of this property regime...in general, though, footnotes operate as maps for other researchers, time-saving devices, filters on information which provide heuristics for defining relevance....property claims seemingly do not extend to these maps of citations....so the collage which research is based on is not itself part of the property that is the research.

but you could argue that research is nothing but collage. particularly in the humanities. i have no problem with collage--at all--in fact i quite like it as a formal device. existing copyright law is entirely at cross-purposes with collage.

where exactly is the line between repetition and plagiarism?

the reason i outlined the two situations above was basically to claim that this line is entirely conventional, proper to particular communities. it leans on functionalities--be they relative to others (students) or to communities themselves (accumulation of symbolic capital, hierarchy formation, etc.)

if you think about it, though, we think, speak, act and write through collage continually. we steal continually, we appropriate continually. invention comes through the process of stealing. copyright law is therefore debilitating, imposing a logic of objects onto processes of creative work.

that's what i take the lautreamont quote to be saying.


(b) following on this, one can turn back to the other part of the op. if the notion of plagiarism is function-based rather than principle-based, what the op seems to me to be about is really the reliability of information in broadcast media.

but is the question of plagiarism the best way to get at this?

i'm thinking about this....maybe more later.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite