I originally posted this query elsewhere but no one seemed interested in talking about it, so I thought this would open it for discussion here.
The other day I saw on a message board that there was some outcry about a ‘plagiarist’ who had taken comments from the message board and inserted them (paraphrased) into an article at his school paper. This got me thinking a bit about how the general attitude of people on this message board is very negative towards plagiarism, but very positive towards piracy (aka “copying media without payment”). I am trying to process this attitude, not because I am staunchly pro-plagiarism or anti-piracy, but because I intuitively feel that the attitude is inconsistent. Both seem to me to be forms of theft. In rebuttal to a message board user arguing that stealing credit is fundamentally different than stealing (copying) goods, I offered my thinking:
To this, someone asserted that he does believe that information should be free, but authorship is different than information. He suggested that authorship involves compiling information, arranging it, and connecting ideas. It is always important to credit authorship because it is a signal of information integrity in our society, and that must be maintained.
My response was this:
Obviously this discussion is one that often gets very heated, but I would like to ratchet the anger back a bit and talk about it in a very philosophical and thoughtful way. Why is giving credit important for our society to promote but ensuring financial compensation for ideas is not necessarily all that important (in spite of economic realities involving the time value of money, and the way it encourages and enables further creative work)? Is this attitude inconsistent, arbitrary, and culturally driven, as I find it? Or is it consistent, valid, and logical as many of my opponents argue?
I think this is the heart of it. If I pirate a CD, I am stealing from the artist. I am not claiming to have created the music, I am merely listening to it without paying.
If, on the other hand, I plagiarize it, I am claiming that the creative process was mine. I am not only denying the musician the financial gain, I am also challenging his musical ability, and taking it for my own.
I think both are wrong, but I think plagiarism is much more of a violation of the victim.
Giving credit is a form of “compensation”. In a situation, like a high school essay, there are usually no monetary stakes. Therefore, citing other works and attributing quotations is way to:
Complete the assignment in an honest manner
To allow the evaluator to properly grade the work you put in
To “compensate” the original author
Secondly, I don’t know anybody who thinks you shouldn’t receive any compensation for your ideas or works. I, like some others, think that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in terms of protecting creators, and allowing them to have an indefinite monopoly. As society advances, more and more collaboration will be necessary to solve complex problems. My issue with current laws is that we often hinder progress to allow the creator to get rich, or protect their creation at the expense of society as a whole.
The other related issue, wrt to music and other other digitized works of art, is that the government has attempted to assign a monetary value to something with near zero marginal costs by force of law (eg. an mp3). This is not only pointless, arbitrary, and unenforceable, but it ignores the larger point that the affected industries need to change their business models to reflect the changes in the value of the products they sell. The new digital economy reflects the changing compensation structure. The money will not come from the sales of CDs, but from concerts, advertising, merchandise, etc. Trying to deny reality by fiat is not going to work, nor is it productive for society.
Giving credit is a form of “compensation”. In a situation, like a high school essay, there are usually no monetary stakes. Therefore, citing other works and attributing quotations is way to:
Complete the assignment in an honest manner
To allow the evaluator to properly grade the work you put in
To “compensate” the original author
Secondly, I don’t know anybody who thinks you shouldn’t receive any compensation for your ideas or works. I, like some others, think that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in terms of protecting creators, and allowing them to have an indefinite monopoly. As society advances, more and more collaboration will be necessary to solve complex problems. My issue with current laws is that we often hinder progress to allow the creator to get rich, or protect their creation at the expense of society as a whole.
The other related issue, wrt to music and other other digitized works of art, is that the government has attempted to assign a monetary value to something with near zero marginal costs by force of law (eg. an mp3). This is not only pointless, arbitrary, and unenforceable, but it ignores the larger point that the affected industries need to change their business models to reflect the changes in the value of the products they sell. The new digital economy reflects the changing compensation structure. The money will not come from the sales of CDs, but from concerts, advertising, merchandise, etc. Trying to deny reality by fiat is not going to work, nor is it productive for society.
Software piracy isn’t theft; it’s unauthorized copying. The original is still there. It may or may not be wrong, but it isn’t theft; it gets called “theft” in order to stir people up against it better than calling it “unauthorized copying” would. Plagiarism however is a form of theft; you are stealing credit.
If Bob writes program X and you pirate it, he still has program X, and there’s no reason to assume that you would have bought it if you couldn’t pirate it. As well, there are often other extenuating circumstances; the pirated version may work better, Bob probably doesn’t actually see any of the money anyway, the program may not be possible to get by buying it (thanks to our ridiculous copyright laws), and so on.
With plagiarism however if you take the credit for X, Bob by definition loses the credit for it. Nor does giving Bob the proper credit keep you from using X, nor does it have the destructive effects that present copyright law has. Our copyright laws ensure that a great many games, songs and books are simply legally unavailable for any price. Over 75% of American music made before 1965 is not legally available, for example. Giving people the credit for things simply doesn’t cause that sort of problem.
I find the idea that someone deserves “credit” to be largely cultural, and ironically founded in the birth of copyright laws. For the longest time, songs were just “folk songs” that no one really knew (or cared) who wrote. They belonged to everyone. Bob Dylan’s first few albums are littered with examples of plagiarism (here’s just one of literally dozens). But it seems that after copyright laws were established to show that someone “created” something, then we had records of ownership and thus suddenly the person who created it was celebrated. If you subscribe to the idea that Bob Dylan was a plagiarist, then why is he not discredited and shamed the way that many other plagiarists have been recently?
My wife is a music historian, and I can assure you that individual creators were celebrated LONG before the invention of copyright. Folk songs became folk songs not because people didn’t CARE about the clever person who came up with the initial version, but because over time as they were passed around through the oral tradition, that information was LOST.
Plagiarism is bad for two reasons completely independent of intellectual property rights:
In an instructional setting it interferes with the instructor’s ability to correctly assess your grasp of the material.
In the real world it makes scholarship much harder by breaking the chain of citation that lets readers track down the related works that your work builds upon.
Whether or not you use the word “theft” to describe software piracy, or plagiarism, or sneaking into a movie without buying a ticket, or dining and dashing at a restaurant, seems to me a question of semantics, not ethics. The question is not whether they’re “theft”; the question is whether they’re wrong.
Moral rights and Intellectual property rights are different things and have different rationalle, so it’s not inconsistent to support one without the other. Moral rights (having your name attached to work you produce) allows individuals to profit from their intellectual work by improving their personal “brand”. This applies to artists as well as academics. Intellectual property allows individuals to profit from their intellectual work by earning money for every use.
A moral rights system would in fact be a good replacement for an intellectual property system. Copies would benefit the author even when people didn’t pay for them, because the author “brand” would increase, and they are more likely to be paid by society for future work.
Bay12 games sort of works like this. Dwarf fortress is free, but so popular that people pay the writer in the hope that he’ll keep putting out new versions.
Without some form of copyright, how will “society” pay them for their future work?
Shouldn’t the decision to distribute my work for free to build my reputation be mine to make? Because if I’m ever going to capitalize on my excellent reputation, at some point I’ll have to start charging.
One aspect that I continually have to bring up is that it seems like piracy advocates are completely unwilling to acknowledge the economic realities of the world-- that time is money, and that people who spend a lot of time on something with the hopes that it will pay off are disincentivized to do it if they think it will be pirated. And this is NOT about greed, as many people make it out to be. People have rents to pay and kids to raise. Given that, I don’t really see why so many people are enraged by plagiarism but not by piracy. If anything, I would think that piracy is actually more damaging to people’s lives in a concrete way.
Yes, but there’s also a bigger upside. Getting lots of entertainment for free provides a powerful incentive to come up with a rationale for why that’s okay.
But with plagiarism … most people simply don’t have jobs where there’s a day-to-day temptation to plagiarize. If you’re not involved in creating new art or new scholarship it’s not even something you have to worry about doing. Avoiding it isn’t even a part of your life. So why expend any effort trying to justify it?
If you’re shooting the shit with a colleague over some ideas you’re mulling over and they turn around and use those ideas without crediting you I think most people would be pretty pissed. Especially if the other guy ends up succeeding.
Yeah, but so? I think plenty of people who made something with the intention of selling it would be pissed if someone got it for free too. Also, plenty of people have sold their credit to someone else for money. So to some people, the money is more important than the credit.
I don’t think anybody holds the position that creators should starve, or that they shouldn’t be compensated in some way. People who are against copyright are against the system of compensation as it is currently set up.
Let me ask you, unless you are an artist, writer or musician, do you get paid for work you did 10, 20 or even 80 to a hundred years ago? Why should anybody expect that?
The incentive argument doesn’t make sense past the immediate future. I guarantee that nobody is stopping themselves from creating art today on the off chance that they won’t get paid for it it 2075.
You tell me. If I bought shares of Microsoft stock in 1980, why should I be able to sell them 30 years later for a profit? Why should I be able to profit from one clever decision so far in the past?
Creative work, like investing in stock, is a gamble. You invest your time/money up front in the hope that your investment will pay off. Maybe the investment will be a complete waste, or maybe you’ll roughly break even, or maybe you’ll hit the jackpot. The bigger the potential jackpot, the more risk I, as an investor, will be willing to take on. The shorter the copyright period, the smaller the potential jackpot. It’s like putting a cap on how much you can earn by selling a stock that went through the roof.
The biggest problem with copyright right now is that works remain in copyright long after it’s profitable to distribute them. There are plenty of good books and music from 50 years ago that are out of circulation purely because the copyright holders can no longer turn a profit on them.
What I would suggest is that after some period, 15 or 20 years, works automatically lapse into the public domain unless the copyright holder pays a yearly fee to keep the copyright. That way orphaned works would be free, while works that were still valuable would continue to provide a return on the wise investment of their creators.
Because it is theft. The pro-theft people are very insistent it not be called that for a reason.
Listen, you can try to split hairs about redefining a word so that it makes your crime sound less criminal, but whether you steal the original or not isn’t the determining factor of whether something is theft or not. Even if we were to pretend unauthorized copying wasn’t taking an actual product away, having access to these items is a service. Musicians perform as a service, and whether you hire them to play in your backyard or buy a CD or make a copy of that CD you are still receiving that service. We have a largely service-based economy. If you get service you are supposed to pay in order to receive without paying for it, that is theft. That makes you a thief. If you don’t want to be called a thief, stop thieving! Don’t complain when people rightly chastise you out for it.
And I am still shocked that a site priding itself on fighting ignorance has so many vocal supporters of a fundamentally ridiculous and corrupt philosophy of taking other people’s work without paying for it. It’s disappointing, really. The mindset is entrenched out of sheer self-absorbed greed, and the rationalizations are long and loud, but that doesn’t mean it any less ignorant.