Thursday, February 11, 2010

Something Borrowed

I've decided to write about the article because the book was not as interesting. When I first started reading the article, I was a little discouraged because it was 11 pages long and was praying that it wouldn't be boring. I liked the preliminary of the stroy because I had no idea what was about to go on but it was built up to be something good. As the story revealed, I was in complete shock that the playwright had stolen the physciatrist but more so at the fact that she had taken entire quotes and scenes that were completely if not incredibly close to the life of the physciatrist. What got me even more is that after wards they met face to face and the playwright said that she had read it in an article and thought it was "news", as a result she did not cite it. Even though she did not cite it, I do not think her morals and ethics should have been questioned because all of the other resources she used were cited. I truly believe that her not citing was an honest mistake and that she was not trying to pull a fast one or anything on the phyciacrist. I was very sad that the media had slandered her and was disappointed at the way the physciatrist went about doing so. I think before anything drastic was done they should have had a one on one meeting with one another. Another point that the article brought up is plagiarism in music and how it is viewed and handled. On hundreds of instances some one has sampled a part of someones song, even if they "originally" wrote, chances are some part of the song is sampled from another. When cases like that are brought to trial even now, I am usually always on the side of the person who is getting sued because it's music and in order to create new music many times they sample others. The only thing that I do not condone is someone talking the entirety of someones work completely without asking for permission. I guess that is what the playwright did but she cited other sources which shows how that it was not on purpose. This is a prime example of how complex and incomplete as to what we categorize as plagiarism. She felt that because it was news she did not have to cite it, even though others felt that she should have and because she didn't, it's plagiarism. There needs to be a universal at least for the US definition of what is seen as plagiarism and what is not in order to limit and exclude all of the confusion and grey areas about the situation.

2 comments:

  1. I can't go along with someone "borrowing" someone's work in its entirety without their approval either! It doesn't hurt to ask, yet some people just won't.
    I don't think we'll ever be able to clearly define and/or understand plagiarism.. =/

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  2. How would you go about coming up with a "universal" definition of plagiarism, though? You'd have to figure out how to define "common knowledge" -- and what constitutes "common knowledge" will vary a lot depending on what you're writing, who you're writing it for, and what discipline you're writing in. It's frustrating that there are so many gray areas, but that's why there's no magic bullet solution.

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