“During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.” -F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance 1941.
To that I have nothing to add . . . .
I don’t think you really get the problem of plagiarism or what it is for undergraduate students.
I could care less if a student is influenced by what he reads and uses that as inspiration to write an essay or paper. But blatant ‘cut and paste’ or changing one word in a copied sentence without quotes is another matter, I hope you would agree.
We want students to write their own papers, not use someone else’s words. That’s a big part of scholarship.
@ G. Cur Fiedler
I feel you are looking at the surface and limiting the quote’s potential only to what the lowest common denominator of lazy students will do with it.
As a student I hope to live up to that quote by assimilating so much knowledge from my instructors, peers and strangers in line at the grocery store that I become able to instinctively take their views into my self, mold them, advance them, apply them to something I’ve considered without prior progress, and return the new beast to the collective for the next mind to shape. If the conversation is so deeply embedded in my thoughts that I automatically pull from it, I’ve held up my end of the learner/educator bargain. Only through participating in the discussion, and using it to progress as well as defeat itself and our own arguments, can we advance knowledge. (And I’m sure I would never have felt that way had I not studied under some instructors who did.)
It’s a good kind of theft to which I hope to one day offer enough valuable information to fall victim.
@G. Cur Fiedler. I think this is one of those cases where your response says more about you than about me. The quote in no way says anything about undergrads, nor did I place it within that frame. The quote is about the way we build academic knowledge, thru using the works of others. That indeed the very point of the quote is that faculty cannot “write their own scholarship,” that the “their own” is always already implicated in a conversation a sort of plagiarism of others.
Your suggestion that you could “care less if a student is influenced by what he reads” betrays your pedagogy, as that is almost all I care about, I want all of my students to be influenced by what they have read, otherwise why would I have them read.
I’m not exactly sure where I stand in relation to this. I agree that “faculty cannot ‘write their own scholarship,’ that the ‘their own’ is always already implicated in a conversation a sort of plagiarism of others.” I jive with the sentiment of the quotation, we stand on the shoulders of giants, etc. Though the rather pithy way the quotation reads is amusing and thought provoking, I believe too many people might not follow their thoughts once provoked and simply end at the conclusion, “well fuck it then, I’ll take whatever I want.” Stressing the importance of community, dialogue, and conversation within each work is good and should be pointed out, however I think talking about such things in the context of a conversation about citation (simply making a nod to the source) is more fruitful than Matthiessen taken out of context.
@Dave: What a shame this descended to arguments about pedagogy so quickly. Maybe I misunderstand both your positions, but G. Cur Fielder’s view doesn’t seem to me to be exclusive of yours. I *want* my students to be so deeply engaged with their material that it is hard to distinguish which thoughts are “theirs”. I couldn’t agree more with Matthiessen’s comment, “The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.” But this is not what I though Fielder was addressing in his comment.
It seems the issue is one of semantics, of the definition of terms. To me, plagiarism is not about using the ideas of others, we all do that (and if we don’t then what are we doing in universities?). Plagiarism is about deception – deliberately and knowingly passing other’s ideas as our own. That, to me, is *not* what Matthiessen was talking about. Deliberate plagiarism is not about sharing in the community of knowledge but about gaining advantage (such as a pass, or a Degree) by deception. This is not assimilating the thoughts of others in the exploration of knowledge, but using their words and ideas for personal gain. Whether undergraduate, post-graduate, artistic, literary, commercial or political (yes, we have had plagiarising politicians in Australia), deception does matter.
My thinking has been influenced by my own reading as well as by my relationships with my teachers, peers and students for decades. I hope that I will continue to adapt and change my thoughts in relationship with them. I trust also that I will acknowledge those influences where I am aware of them. While a good idea doesn’t care who it belongs too, a good scholar does care about the development of those ideas. This is the scholarship part of “Plagiarism, Scholarship, and Community Knowledge”.
Or am I missing the point entirely?
@Tim. No I don’t think you are missing the point. I was just being snarky in my previous reply, as when I read this quote (which appears in the end of Matthiessen’s acknowledgements) it reflected a much different attitude towards scholarship, one which recognizes how he doesn’t own his ideas, and that he consistently borrows/steals from others. Thus, I thought, given current discussions about these issues, this perspective, from one of the “founders of American lit” might be interesting. So, I posted it. I honestly was not in any way thinking about teaching . . . but it seem that some took it this way, which reflects what I think is an interesting moment in teaching: the hypersensitivity to plagiarism. Plagiarism from our students comes to serve as some great threat that we all must work to combat, a “war on plagiarism” that clouds are thinking, and doesn’t really reflect what is going on. I would much prefer to discuss this quote on its own terms, that is not in relation to the classroom, which is how it is written.
"One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past"
Goes right to your point… if we had to start from scratch every day, and not learn from others success (or, more importantly, the mistakes of others), we’d still be in caves. It is only through what was passed to us that we have a better tomorrow.
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Very true. I am writing fiction in an attempt to create manga with some friends. Although it’s not necessarily community knowledge for the advancement of society, I still know that I’m drawing a lot of my ideas from my personal experiences and the anime and manga that I’ve seen and read in my life.
I’ve learned how to tie up endings and how to create suspense. I’ve learned what some would say is the formula to progressing certain aspects of characters using similar devices from other works of fiction. If authors and publishers lock down those devices/formulas, then I’m sure I’d come up with new ways to accomplish those tasks; however, there would be a lot of failures before hitting on something that was sure to entertain or maybe even make sense.
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Which is more important? Living in the past or moving into the future?
@AJB: We never start from zero. Even if everything in the universe was patented, copyrighted, and trademarked, we would still have use of the end products, which would spur intelligent people to find new ways to do something (creativity sparked!). Even under the horrible, terrible, massively restrictive rules that are dragging mankind down, we have still made more advanced in the last 40 years than mankind made in the 100 before that, and probably the 1000 before that.
Quite simply, when you look at the evidence,it doesn’t support the concept that productivity or the search for knowledge is limited or hobbled, quite the opposite. 100 years ago, we didn’t have even penicillin, now we are decoding the human genome.
Not bad for a group of people restrained by the overwhelming weight of the shackles of copyright, patent, and trademarks.
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100 years ago copyright laws aren’t what they are today, 50 years ago they aren’t what they are today, seemingly every year they try to become more and more restrictive to the point where I couldn’t draw "sonic the hedgehog" with a jet pack legally as a Elementary Student!
If anything you have proven the point of the person you responded to.
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This is a false dichotomy, especially in terms of copyright. As you’ve correctly pointed out many times here Mike, copyright in no way protects "ownership of ideas," in only protects the unique and specific expression of ideas. Therefore there can be no plagiarism of ideas: though good scholarship and common courtesy would urge crediting the source of an idea one borrows, it doesn’t require it.
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Roger that, GP seemed to miss the fact that copyright laws have changed drastically in the last generation or two. Mickey Mouse should be in public domain, but they (Disney) embarked on a massive reform campaign to make it so it wouldn’t be. Bonno (the bastard) helped. Now you can get in legal trouble for converting media you paid for into a different format!
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Sometimes physical, human, and mental constraints make it such that there are only a few correct solutions…perhaps only one or none.
In these cases, if the first person to pass that bridge puts a toll on it after passing, the rest of us are forced to either pay, or find inferior routes.
Consider it like bridge-building in the real world. There are natural locations for bridges, typically in narrows between two land masses. Thing Golden Gate, Chesapeake, the Chunnel, etc. What if somebody locked up the "idea" of putting a bridge in these locations?
Saying "Either pay me for my great idea, or just build your bridge somewhere else" severely limits subsequent bridging, either by a tax on the best location, or forcing sub-optimal routings.
What many on the pro-IP side seem to think is that there are unlimited solutions to problems, so if you don’t want to license someones existing work just invent your own. Yet I don’t think this is how the world works. There are not multiple solutions to building a wheel, once the circle is locked up.
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Derek, you cannot copyright or patent an "idea" only the expression of the idea.
Example, a toll bridge. You can get a patent on the payment system (automated systems that catch the coins in mid air, example), and their design, but you cannot patent the idea of a toll.
Same with bridges – you can patent / copyright the specific design of a bridge (and even that is questionable), but you cannot patent the idea of a bridge or the placement of it. You might be able to get a patent on a really nifty neat-ox gizmo that can calculate the exact perfect location for a bridge, but it doesn’t stop someone from doing the same work in a different way.
Mike is pretty agressive here with implying that ideas can and have been patent, which is just not true. If someone comes up with X, you cannot duplicate X, but if you arrive at X using different underlying methods, you are not in violation of their patent. Thus there are 4000+ mouse trap patents, because the simple idea "trap mouse" isn’t patent – just various systems designed to do it.
Thus, all of your examples are sort of meaningless, because you are confusing a general idea with specific designs or systems.
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"In these cases, if the first person to pass that bridge puts a toll on it after passing, the rest of us are forced to either pay, or find inferior routes."
———————-
You are forgetting "find a superior route".
"What if somebody locked up the "idea" of putting a bridge in these locations?"
———————-
Straw man.
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I couldn’t agree more with such a sentiment. Consider the physical human body. It functions in accordance with the laws of altruism. All cells work together in harmony, moving the vital resources of the body from organ to organ in order to produce life. More resources are placed into those weakest parts of the body that need more help. When a cell starts working for itself rather than the body, we call it cancer.
Consider this in terms of a ‘body of knowledge’. In order for us to create movement and evolution in this kind of body, the same principles must be applied. Of course, a small amount of resistance (consider for instance, a few years of exclusive intellectual property – patent, copyright) serves to make the organism stronger. But too much resistance, and the whole body separates, and therefore dies. Let’s hope that we can bring society under the governance of these obvious, practical laws for the sake of our survival.
Keep repeating that. It won’t make it any less nonsensical. Copyright gives you power over all expressions of an idea—not just your own expression of an idea within a book, but that idea expressed in any other copy of the book. Copyright has given you power not over any expression, but over the idea itself. What is that idea? The sequence of letters in your book (and any other sequence that only the Supreme Court can decide is similar).
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Wrong.
Idea: Boy wizard goes to a school for wizards, learns to use a wand, and faces a magical foe.
Expression: Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts and faces Voldemort.
The former is an idea that anyone can use. The latter is a specific expression of ideas. The former is not protectable. The latter is.
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Um…metaphor much?
I’m not talking about building bridges nor bridge design at all.
The "narrows" I mention like the Golden Gate are a metaphor for the easiest, most obvious, inevitably discovered best method to cross from A to B. If the first guy to think of building that orange bridge across the span hadn’t though of it, someone else would probably have come up with the same solution later on.
Similar to the fact that there are logical, inevitable discoveries for the best placement of bridges, there are logical, inevitable discoveries for the best solutions to many advances in the tech, music, or design world. This is debatable for sure, but we’ve seen evidence pile up, since so many inventions are pursued in parallel at different times, like the airplane, the steam engine, some naturally pleasing melodies, etc. Of course, first to patent wins in our world.
Perhaps, like bridge locations, there is a natural solution to the problem of "a method for sending email to a wireless device", "a method to click on a website to purchase a good", or others. This is what you call the expression of the idea. I argue that locking up an expression may not be a good thing, if that expression were an inevitable solution, and would promptly be discovered by somebody else in the absence of the first inventor. If it’s inevitable, or a natural solution, then we don’t need patents to spur its creation. Free market rewards should be compensation enough.
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An amazing and freeing quote. In my own writing I frequently struggle trying to remember whether an idea is something I came up with, something i heard or read, or something I assimilated some other way. One consequence is I tend to over cite.
Matthiessen reminds me that “The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.”
I still need to cite. I still have to talk about plagiarism with my students. But I need also to remind them why we even bother inhabiting the community of knowledge.