Acknowledging the work of others

Topic: Reviewing the history of plagiarism

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To what extent is the shame of plagiarism based on values other than economic values?

Read this account of the emergence of interest in plagiarism in the Western European tradition:

 

“I will begin by drawing a parallel between the historical process of land enclosure that occurred in England from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries [and] the development and spread of print and suggest thereby that both expressed new concepts of economics and of the self. Correlate developments in private land ownership, copyright, and the rise of the author, along with the concept of plagiarism, reveal that commodification (the idea that everything can be sold on an open market) is the ideology that unites all these apparently disparate developments, and affects the way we conceptualize what we do in our classrooms, what we expect from our students, and what they produce in response to our expectations.” (p.4)
“And just as the industrial revolution gave rise to patents, so too the printing press gave rise to copyrights, and therefore to the concept of plagiarism – that is to say, plagiarism and its cousin copyright infringement can only exist when books have become commodities and writers have become “authors” (Foucault, 1977; Mallon, 1989.)” (p.7-8)

 

Scurrah., W.L. (2001, March). Plagiarism, enclosure, and the commons of the mind. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Denver, Colorado. Retrieved November 20, 2007 from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED451570&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED451570*

 

Focus questions

Record your thoughts here for future reference:

 

Introduction to this topic

* Used with the author's permission.