>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.
That is very true. It reminds me of a story from my TA days at Rutgers. One of the fellow TA's discovered that a term paper turned in by a student was a word-for-word copy of an AIDS information brochure disseminated by the university. She flunked that student for plagiarism, but he appealed to the dean. His defence: "I did not plagiarize, I just copied it from a fellow student. I had no idea that she plagiarized it from the university brochure."
>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 thought quite the opposite is true - one can "copyright" styles, business concepts, genetic traits, seeds, plants, etc. - or at least nowadays, no?
>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.
Not exactly - my position depends on the grants we get, which in turn depend on what we publish. Besides, I have publication of my own - although the royalties I receive I not very impressive, to say the least.
>Professionl writers feel differently. That's why Courtney Love has fits
>about Napster.
This utterly confuses two issues - "intellectual property" or monopoly rights and remuneration for intellectual work. When I make a table and sell that table to you, my rights to that table terminate as soon as I am remunerated for it. It would be utterly ridiculous for me to demand further payments from you each time you use that table or if you sold that table to someone else. But that is precisely what the intellectual commodity producers demand under the intellectual property rights. In fact, they demand an ultimate monopoly rights - they own the property all the time and merely let you use it - like feudal landlords.
In my book, writers and kindred intellectual commodity producers are no different than any other workers (who said that writing a book is more creative than making objects, building houses, etc.?) - they should be remunerated for the time they spent while producing the commodity instead of being given the feudal-like monopoly rights to that commodity.
wojtek