Posner’s little book–and it truly is–is a full yet concise legal analysis of the concept of plagiarism. Evidently the concept of what constitutes the concept has been affected by the society in which time it has occurred, which helped assuage my initial shock at some of the historical references used.

What Posner stresses, and which makes sense to me, is that the plagiarist must have the intent to defraud the public by claiming originality of the copied passage. What surprises Posner and others is that quotation marks would easily clarify and negate any claim of stolen intellectual property yet many feel that this simple punctuation would detract from the natural reading of the work.

It’s definitely an interesting and informative read and actually helped a hard-noser like me to be a little more tolerant.

This passage from Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism is interesting:

“Politics may have played the decisive role in [Doris Kearns] Goodwin’s surprisingly swift rehabilitation, as we’ll see; and, speaking of politics, I note that one reason for the ambivalence of reactions to plagiarism is that the Left, which dominates intellectual circles in the United States, is soft on plagiarism. Notions of genius, of individual creativity, and of authorial celebrity, which inform the condemnation of plagiarism, make the leftists uncomfortable because they seem to celebrate inequality and “possessive individualism” (that is, capitalism).” (p. 94)

Yeah, I noticed that, the relatively blase’ attitude towards what I might have become outraged about or taken an overly moralistic stand based on principle. Posner puts it in a straightforward statement that connects the dots.

First, though the definition of plagiarism has changed over the ages, it seems it’s been around a long time:

“–the actual first use may have been much earlier) in something like its modern sense by the Roman poet Martial in the first century A.D. A plagiarius was someone who either stole someone else’s slave or enslaved a free person, In his epigram number 52 Martial applied the term metaphorically to another poet, whom Martial accused of having claimed authorship of verses that Martial had written.”  (Posner, p. 50)

Plagiarists (and students!) take note–here it is almost 2000 years later and people still are talking about it. Sort of the perfect example and a great lesson in “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” (William Shakespeare)

Speaking of Shakespeare, Posner goes on to point out a passage from Antony and Cleopatra that is clearly taken from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch.

The concept at the time evidently was that writing someone else’s words even better was an improvement, not a copying or stealing of those words. True, as Posner notes, Shakespeare said it so eloquently that even our modern interpretation of plagiarism will willingly forgive him.

It still bothers me though.

Shakespeare seems appropriate here

On the subject of plagiarism, Posner establishes the differences between infringement, plagiarism, and fair use. As he states:

“Reliance and hence fraud and hence plagiarism are matters of expectation.” (p. 31)

Which means to me that there is no clearly drawn line, but rather it is easily an arguable state. He would seem to imply an intent to defraud according to the beliefs of the reading public as the defining point. This covers and holds harmless then much research and ghostwriting that is a usual or normal practice to be ascribed to a single or certain authorship.

Fine and dandy, except that isn’t intent a much more difficult concept to prove? I can easily see the “well people knew darn well I didn’t write that but that so and so did” used as a justification. To carry it further into the academic scenario, it would seem that the very thing that tips professors off to check for plagiarism (that idiot couldn’t have written that) would be the idiot’s primary defense.