Plagiarism, authenticity and responsibility

I recently wrote a series on responsibility:

• Affirmations for responsibility
• E Prime as a way to be responsible
• Sincerity and integrity as forms of responsibility
• Humility and the power of don’t know leads to responsibility
• Acceptance as responsibility
• I language and responsibility
• Responsibility and must

Today I wish to write about

Plagiarism, authenticity and responsibility

Two events happened recently that made me think about plagiarism and how it makes you less authentic and therefor reduces your sense of responsibility and hence lowers your self esteem:

1. A couple of weeks ago I gave a free report on marketing to a friend and he read it and said the author was known for plagiarizing other people’s work. In fact in the report I had passed him the author gave many marketing techniques and ideas but in each case he attributed the ideas to the originators. This is not plagiarizing but is doing honest research and producing a good report.
   This way instead of having to read ten different books I got the salient ideas in twenty pages.
   Plagiarism is claiming someone else’s work as your own.
2. Last night we saw a BBC TV production of Emma by Jane Austine. This reminded me that the movie Clueless was a modern retelling of Emma and I don’t remember seeing any admission to that fact in the movie. There may be one, I just don’t remember it. However the movie, “She’s the man,” admits straight out that it is a modern retelling of Shakeseare’s “Twelfth night.”
   This use of other people’s plots without any attribution has been done in so many movies and TV shows. This is perfectly acceptable if the original work is in the public domain as in Jane Austin or William Shakespeare.
   In fact the Bard of Stratford himself used earlier plays and sources for many of his plots. However, he added so much of his own work.

And as Newton said, “The reason I can see further is that I stand on the shoulders of giants.” That is the human condition. We learn from earlier generations and then are supposed to improve or at least change and make our own.

When we are inauthentic and copy someone else’s work with no attribution we plagiarize and lack responsibility. You may be able to fools others but you cannot fool yourself and if you plagiarize your self esteem will go down.

As a side note someone has copied a page of teaching stories from our main website without any change or attribution. I felt both betrayed and violated and at the same time I felt a sense of pride that someone is ready to steal my work. I wrote one email asking them to take the page down. But the site is in Australia and I lack funds to send a cease and desist letter so I’ll just take it as a vote of confidence in my writing.

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