>
>At 02:28 PM 6/26/2002 +0000, justin wrote:
>
>>So, J, you think that I should not have been bothered by the freshman who
>>presented me, when I was teaching, with John Rawls' Two Concepts of Rules,
>>offered as his own term paper? (I flunked him for class.) jks
>
>
>A more creative approach would be to make sure that he plagiarized it well
>- i.e. check how well he absorbed the concepts and its implications.
Nah, he just quoted a big chunck of it word for word.
> After
>all, "borrowing" good ideas from other people is the main engine of
>civilisational progress - the peoples who do not plagiarise stay stagnant -
>the claims of intellectual commodity producers notwithstanding.
If one could feel confident that students who plagiarize are actually using and working with the material these use, one one could conclude theyt're not plagiarizing. More typically they just take oneone else's work, thesedays, off the net, as their own, and submit it, having done nothing more by way of work that copying onto their hard drives and adding their names.
>
>After all, the concept of "originality" and "intellectual property" is but
>a demand for monopoly rights by intellectual commodity producers. Claiming
>"ownership" of thoughts and ideas is absurd.
Quite right. No one thinks otherwise. It's using someone else's specific words that is plagiarism. Btw, you can't copyright thoughts and ideas, just specific symbolic representations realized in some medium.
I note that your contempt for intellectual property law stems from the social position o someone whose income does not depend on protection of the specific symbolic representations that you produce. You get your salary even if (like most professors) you are not paid any money for the stuff you write. Professionl writers feel differently. That's why Courtney Love has fits about Napster.
jks
jks
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