Grand Theft Words: How Should Plagiarism be Punished?
February 22, 2010 | Alicia Ostarello
Harry Potter Asks You Not To Cheat
Plagiarism isn’t droned on about to college students the first day of every class simply because professors are droll individuals who love to hear the sound of their own voice. It’s because academic plagiarism happens at the university level, and because bouts of plagiarism occur in the real world too, like the recent lawsuit brought against JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter.
Rowling is being accused of swiping ideas and themes of the wizarding world from Adrian Jacobs’ book, The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: No. 1 Livid Land. Rowling has pooh-poohed the accusations, and says she has never even read the writing of Jacobs.
Plagiarism in the fiction world isn’t a new concept. A few years ago, Harvard student author Kaavya Viswanathan was caught red-worded copying exact passages of her novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life from Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts series. If university students at Harvard are busy not crafting their own work, I have to worry that it’s more widespread than we realize.
Even the reporting world isn’t immune to acts of plagiarism. According to the New York Times, one of their own reporters has been caught plagiarizing a story. And we all know about the Jayson Blair fiasco.
Of course, one could argue that stealing is the culture now. We download music illegally from the internet, and pirate copies of movies we want to see. Even photography is easy to take and write your own name on. Anything artistic seems to be at risk.
It’s interesting how copying happens on a daily basis at the college level, in research papers, on tests, and even on homework assignments, yet we rarely see mention of it in daily life. But when copying happens in fiction, it becomes four star news. I think university newspapers should be required to list the incidents of plagiarism on campus, thus calling out the student and hopefully making them ashamed of their actions.
What do you all think? Should there be more public humiliation for college students that plagiarize? Or should we continue to quietly accept its existence? Is it just our culture now? I think it just goes to show how important citations are.
