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johndan -at- PURDUE -dot- EDU,Internet writes:
>As someone pointed out earlier, there are both ethical and legal aspects
>to
>deal with here. In terms of the legal copyright doctrine (in the U.S. at
>least), it could be argued that the verbatim copying of the sentence from
>one company's manual to another is a violation of copyright. Although such
>cases frequently take into account the proportion of copied material to
>the
>whole work (and in this case it seems like it's a very, very small
>percentage), it's also possible to argue that even a small proportion was
>a
>key element and should therefore be protected (this case was made
>successfully in lawsuits against 2LiveCrew by Acuff-Rose Music [for
>"Pretty
>Woman" riffs] and against The Nation by [I think] Random House [when The
>Nation published an excerpt of Gerald Ford's memoirs containing the bit
>where Ford decides to pardon Nixon]. Also, keep in mind that in the U.S.
>people generally have the right to sue, so a company *could* decide to sue
>even if they didn't have much of a case.
I just know people are sick of this issue. But! I have a friend
whose job is as a patent attorney--I've talked to him about plagiarism
occasionally. BTW, I think any
writer who has done more than a little writing (whatever that means), has
confronted this
issue in one way or another?
My friend used to say, (and this isn't legal advice, of course!) that
plagiarism is
actually 'representing the ideas of another as your own.' And that
plagiarism has become
associated in the popular mind much more with copying word for word. So
copying word for
word can be plagiarism, but using someone's ideas without attribution can
be as well.
I would think if you wrote a book where you--in your own words--put forth
the ideas of Darwin, that a rose grower commonly selects those bushes
he/she likes, propogates those seeds, thereby improving the crop; and that
natural selection takes the place of the rose grower in the wild--if you
wrote this without mentioning Darwin, that wouldn't be quite right.
In my book on a Netscape technology, much of my sources were Netscape
sources.
I didn't copy word for word when writing those sections of the book. A few
times in an introductory section I'd say "this series of steps is derived
from the development kit provided by Netscape," or something along those
lines. The editor on my book confirmed that the stickiest times she got in
trobule with plagiarism as an editor were not the 'word by word' cases,
but those cases where an author failed
to attribute large sections of 'stealing,' because he or she had reworded
everything.
