For obvious reasons, I wish to avoid giving hints about what non-plagiaristic quasi-plagiarism I have hereby confessed. However, it would be beneficial for me to reduce the inscrutable abstractions of my OP to a few hypothetical concrete examples. I will then briefly explain why I am bumping this thread.
In what circumstances may a person with absolutely honest motives commit an innocent act which, in a mechanistic application of rules, could be misconstrued as “plagiarism”? Off-the-cuff, for the purpose of a threshold demonstration that such a thing
is possible, I present hereby but a few examples:
Privacy, especially for “IRL” relationships: An interpolated line from personal correspondence, or even from someone else’s secret diary may be a silent acknowledgment of that person’s influence. If the other person reads it, then it may be a private in-joke. For example, if I had an illicit affair with the associate editress of an
art magazine, suppose that she were to pilfer a single unique sentence from one of my
encrypted love-notes, and insert it into an unsigned editorial about
Puritanical attempts to censor the fine arts. I would laugh—and I wouldn’t rat her out to the editor-in-chief for her naughty little “plagiarism”.
An intellectual guerrilla’s freedom of speech: Under a book-burning régime, an activist who finds it too dangerous to express his true opinions may quote without quotes from a banned book by an unmentionable author. He may do this as a quiet show of solidarity—and to spread banned ideas in a way that “flies under the radar”, whilst ultimately
preserving credit to the originator of the
ideas.
It is a
literary commitment in the manner of a cryptographic commitment, made with words and ideas instead of numbers. Years, decades, or even centuries later, after political fashions have changed, professors may analyse the texts to reveal hidden sympathies.
(Note for future scholars: Although the technique itself is surely age-old, I believe that this is the first description thereof as a “literary commitment” by analogy to a cryptographic commitment. I leave to future work a detailed comparison and contrast of the properties of literary and cryptographic commitments.)Ethical ghostwriting: Although I would
never do such a thing in an academic environment, I acknowledged somewhere that I have worked as a ghostwriter. For example, I once did a long-term stint authoring
all of the English-language personal and business correspondence of a businessman who barely even
spoke English. My involvement was strictly confidential; and anyway, identifying the true author of a ghostwritten piece would be counterproductive.
Although I have been silently contemplating these issues for years, what motivated me to instigate this topic was my annoyance at inaction in
the Ratimov case. I had no personal stake in that case, and no reason to take it personally. Nonetheless, I was outraged to see excessive lenity being granted to the blatant, methodical ripping off of authors who surely would be aggrieved to see that.
At that, my sympathy with authors I do not know rose from my knowing how I would feel if someone did that to me. Dare I say it? I
empathised with those authors.
Now, this is personal: Someone else ripped off one of my posts in a way so blatant that
to see the quotes together is a visual punch in the face. Adding insult to injury, that person is known to dislike me; he has even claimed to have me ignore-listed. It is reasonable to infer that he desired to avoid acknowledging me, simply from spite:
Quote nullius? Never! What nutildah did is exceptionally malicious.
By approaching the subject from an unusual angle, this topic hereby
should incite people to think more deeply about plagiarism. What
is plagiarism? Why is it wrong? Whom does it hurt, and how?
N.b. that in all of my above hypotheticals, the author suffers no detriment—and neither does any other party, unless “inability to persecute dissidents” is accounted as detrimental to the would-be persecutors.
By contrast, what harm is caused by actual plagiarism?
I myself would not want to contribute or to engage with the community in any venue where plagiarism is treated as acceptable. I doubt that I am alone in so saying. Do
you want to spend time from your limited lifetime posting on a forum where, although random shitposting n00bs may be banned for plagiarism, a free pass to plagiarise is granted to high-profile users
in positions of community trust?Whereas I myself
have violated the absolute letter of the forum’s rule against plagiarism—knowingly, intentionally, with honest motives, with
unselfish motives, in an unusual way that accords with authorial interests. Not oft—rarely; sparingly—occasionally; from time to time, as warranted—I have done it; I continue to do it; and for as long as I continue to post here, I shall continue to do it. If I were to reveal just what I mean by “null plagiarism”, which is truly
contraplagiarism, then the results would be...
interesting. Perhaps I may do that someday—or perhaps never. For today, this is my way of urging people to examine plagiarism from a perspective different than “the rules say that it is forbidden”.
