I’ve never understood why people on Hacker News feel the need to make these year comments? Particularly in cases like this where it adds nothing at all to the conversation.
It has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old. If the content was a couple days newer would there be value in commenting “(2024)”?
Beyond that, everything on that page has explicit exact dates. It’s Reddit. We can read the actual date and not just the year ourselves.
It's HN's mods' convention to tag articles in that style [0]. If we want to have a conversation about every eccentric thing HN's mods do to this site, and whether they make sense or not, we'd be talking for a long time.
(That person's comment was benign, in my opinion, because the mods are going to manually hide this subthread anyway—it's a minor and short-lived distraction. It's a pretty common interaction on HN: there's a meta-discussion about the HN submission itself, "please edit the title / please change the URL to this one / please whatever", and 'dang steps in and says "Thanks! Fixed", and then he kills the subthread because it's no longer relevant. I feel this status quo is basically okay?)
Normally I'd complain about linking to reddit, but there's a level of rigor here that I think is worthy of attention and discussion. I'm not a mod or anything, but I've seen blog posts here with less effort and citation than this hit the front page all the time. It's also about a month old according to the reddit timestamps, so the discussion isn't really ongoing there (Though of course this hitting HN could revive it I suppose).
Whoa, that's thorough. Damning, easily replicable, overwhelming evidence that this guy is indeed a fraud.
> He runs the Self Publishing Formula course and podcast, he talks at the 20BooksTo50K conference in Vegas, and he’s part of a new initiative called Fuse Publishing. He’s a pretty big deal in self-publishing, so what he does reflects on self-publishing as a whole.
Like instagram "buy my course to learn how I got rich" finance-influencers, the same old quip seemingly applies to self-publishing..: don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are.
Oh these guys are so exhausting. My favorite was Grant Cardone — the real estate mogul who’s said he’d be ashamed if he made 400k a year. All of them and his ilk peddling this you can get rich fast stuff are disgusting.
Aren't some of these schemes actually possible but only if you are a scumbags? It's somehow always get a ballon mortgage to buy multi-family housing and raise the rents by 100%, or buy dilapidated shacks and get section 8 money while putting nothing in to improve squalid conditions.
I’ve a single condo rental in Portland. It’s the home my wife and I bought when we got married but rent out now cuz we’re in Germany. It’s rented at less than market because of many reasons none having to do with the state of the home — it’s the nicest place I’ve ever seen — but mostly my ignorance in being a landlord. That being said we try to be the best landlords we can. We fix things ASAP and try to make it like we’d like it if we were renting there.
From what I remember the city of Portland at least had such a dirth of units being offered for section 8 due to many landlords having had their units trashed or otherwise fearful of the general bad press about section 8 tenants that there’s not a lot landlords willing to participate in the program leading to a lack of supply.
The upside for landlords though is that the govt pays the rent and it’s often a higher amount than one might get otherwise. There are of course downsides.
There's a lot of reliance on people's basic inabilities to do math.
My mother-in-law wanted us to go with her to a seminar hosted/ sponsored/ affiliated with one of the house flippers on TV.
They of course talked about their course on how to do it.
And they talked about how "nearly 8,000 people have done this!" and that if you did, too, you'd have access to their financing which, "has given our members over $100M to buy houses to flip! Some of them have flipped 20+ homes with us!" Cue oohs and ahhs.
Because $100M seems a lot. Until you're talking houses. Because in most areas in the country, even a workable flipper house is still going to be $100K, at a minimum. And $100M only buys you 1,000 houses.
Hmm. 8,000 people have paid $5,999 to do your course. And you've flipped 1,000 houses, some people doing 20+ each. That means that realistically, less than one-in-ten of the people who paid for your course ever flip a house.
So yeah, they made a not shabby amount on the costs and interests of those loans...
... and $48M "teaching" people to get rich by flipping homes.
Yeah … such courses should be illegal. Though they wouldn’t have to be made illegal if some people had some sense of shame or any moral compasses. Instead they prey on the uninformed and the gullible
>"don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are"
Always good advice. Someone sent me one of those day trader Bros that constantly shows their Lambo and I immediately saw warning lights. I had to tell my buddy that he didn't get the Lambo trading...he got it off suckers who think there's a magical formula for average Joe to make millions with nearly zero risk.
He could have also potentially got it off trading, since he'd have to show his Lambo first before getting suckers who think there's a magical formula for the average Joe to make millions.
Or, hypothetically, he could have rented it for cheaper and then bought an actual one with the money from the suckers.
A fair point and one I didn't even think of. At this point in my life I prefer more family time to anything like a luxury car. My old car gets me around town just fine.
Even worse, probably rented the Lambo for a day for a photo shoot because he knows that’s what suckers will go. Cars, penthouses and watches - like flies to poop, as they say.
When I used to watch more YouTube they constantly had ads where some trading bro is offering to share the secret to making money.
Why not just use it on himself instead? This guy has paid money out of the kindness of his heart to make sure the public knows about this bulletproof money making technique.
I think in a court of law it may be more of a charge of plagiarism than outright fraud, but I get your point. And like you said, anyone who makes a career out of "how to be rich and successful at doing whatever", would probably be better off heeding their own advice and become rich and successful at doing whatever rather than yakking unendingly about it.
This is a huge issue in self publishing. Sure, some people got lucky and can churn out a book a month and make decent money. But so many more sell books/courses on 'how to make money'.
Some will show you their revenue, "I'm a six figure author!" But frequently hide how much they spend on ads or editing. Or try to hide that they're making ~$50k on courses/affiliate sales and their net is... ~$50k. Writing is a net zero income for them and most of it is just used to sell courses/products.
>don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are.
What bothers me most is that promotion is so important for solo entrepreneurs, that some people will placate the grifters in return for exposure. It's hard to call people out. We end up in a place where everyone is selling to everyone else.
In the context of p-adic numbers and p-adic analysis, "lifting" generally refers to a process where an object defined in a simpler or more restricted setting (like modulo a power of a prime number) is extended or 'lifted' to a more complex or complete setting (like the p-adic numbers).
"In number theory, given a prime number p, the p-adic numbers form an extension of the rational numbers which is distinct from the real numbers, though with some similar properties"
Related: the Norwegian press is now examining the theses of Norwegian ministers and politicians after a Twitter/x user found plagiarism in the Master's thesis of the Minister of Science - she had to go on the hour and may lose her degree. Other ministers are now being scrutinized
So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!
Good. While this presenteistic witch hunt looks like a bit much, I feel finding and shaming plagiarists is a great idea. I’ve known a few from my academic life including some of the smartest people I worked with. Thus it’s no measure of intellectual frailty. Just a moral one. Any public figure is totally justified to be shamed for plagiarism IMO.
Did they find real plagiarism that was obviously fraudulent or did someone cite an author improperly. I know in academic circles it's basically the same, but some things I've seen recently accusing people of plagiarism are just draconian IMO like they cited the person, but screwed up the quotes somehow.
More than 20% of her thesis was copied almost verbatim from other sources [1], including typos [2], mostly without citation. This wasn't discovered at the time (2014)
What's more - self-plagiarism has been a huge topic in the university sector and the Minister has been quite strict towards students re-using text on exams without citation (to their own previous exams), with several cases going to the court.
Thanks for the reply and insight. It sounds like what I would call fraudulent plagiarism based on your reply and links. 20% is pretty crazy. Especially the hypocrisy.
Both the Gay and Oxman plagiarism cases have some plagiarized passages being defended by saying "well, she did cite the source, it should have been in quotes but still..." So the passage uses the exact words used in the source, sometimes even an exact quote, and there's a cite, but no quotes to indicate that not just the concept or fact is being cited but the actual passage is taken from the source.
Whether this is "screwing up the quotes" or not depends on your perspective.
I have no idea about publishing or book writing or anything, so please enlighten me, but how much of that is plagiarism and how much of that is what would be called "fair use" in other domains?
The post only refers to excerpts of long-winded descriptions of stuff, not to large plots or entire paragraphs plagiarized.
Is that very different from asking ChatGPT to generate a thorough description of a situation and using this? Would that be plagiarism too?
> In 2020, Dawson's book The Cleaner reached number 8 in the Hardback Fiction section of The Sunday Times' bestseller list after he purchased 400 copies of the book, seeing it to have previously been in position number 13
The scumbaggery is endemic, not isolated to creative repurposing of other people's sentences!
Artificially inflating sales numbers to get higher on bestseller lists seems like an intentional deception to secure unfair gain. How is that not fraud?
Sure, I think the matter of contention here is whether buying your own book is deceptive (as a mandatory element of fraud). So if the body publishing those figures of sales hasn't reached an agreement with you that you'll refrain from that behavior then I don't see a way for it to be deceptive and so not fraudulent.
He did buy those books, though -- correct? Were those not real sales of real books that were paid for with real money?
There's no implication that he crossed out a number on a report before artificially enhancing it by increasing it by 400, is there?
I feel that both of these examples are reprehensible in this context, but that only one of them rises to the level of fraud.
(I mean: There are companies performing stock buybacks all the time for various reasons, and some of those reasons can include improving the market's perception of that stock's value.)
It's well known that best sellers lists are manipulated in this way, but there's not a lot you can do about it. If I just ask 400 friends to buy my book, and compensate them in home cooked meals and quality time, is that unfair manipulation? It's tough to draw a line.
Here’s an alternative POV that could be illuminating:
To be financial successful as a writer (or any creative endeavor), if you do not have special access, you must either gain special access or get into the business of publishing yourself.
As noble as “gain access” may seem by comparison, it has very few seats on the ride & the power law seems to have the perverse effect of narrowing the number over time.
The business of publishing is & has always been substantially about manufacturing hype. You might get one generational talent at its start, but mostly you are selling the talent you have.
As much as we all seem to want opportunity to be earned on meritocracy alone, we don’t spread our attention that way and we certainly don’t distribute in any kind of premeditated way to ensure our values are applied to society. Perhaps algorithmic content distribution will change that one day, but so far it mostly hasn’t.
So for any new work, even for authors you know & love, to get sufficient revenue it has to grab significant attention in a brief period of time.
Underlying all hype machines is usually some kind of gameable metric of attention - views, endorsements, critical review.
All publishers have a formula for how they get some of it or they fail at their job. Publishers will be the first to tell you what they do isn’t enough because everyone does it.
“New York Times Best Seller” is a great example. Generally considered a fair standard of what is interesting, it mostly drifts off Amazon rankings with some mollifying factors.
Part of the durability of this system is that when one person has been found to hack those rankings, like here by purchasing 400 of their own books, it appears that they are a dishonest person gaming the system.
Every NYT Best Selling author I’ve met either personally orchestrated, or had it done for them, volume book sales to friend’s businesses & conferences to achieve the same affect.
Perhaps people who are insufficiently clever should be morally punished for the crime of showing us our own foibles.
But the “scumbaggery is endemic,” which is now one of my favorite sentences, is as easily cast as disapproval for a few people as it is a statement of how people in large groups choose what is interesting to talk about.
Either way, we’ve got no solution for society working the way we think it does vs working to exploit the way we think it does.
I thought the Internet might, but so far it seems better at distributing the latter than solving for the former.
What strikes me from the examples in the OP is that this method of plagiarism doesn’t seem very easy. How would you produce this kind of thing? Eg maybe you read a lot and collect a large number of flowery phrases to use over time or maybe you just pinch phrases you like from whatever you read today. I guess I usually associate plagiarism with less effort than seems to have been required here.
It’s a collage of flowery phrases taken from here and there. I don’t think it’s plagiarism, because it involves copying larger chunks than a convenient paragraph.
Originality is the art of hiding your sources, which has become utterly impossible nowadays with the search engines.
If he had studied after the 2010s, he would have paraphrased a bit more to confuse google
When I was in high school/university, they taught us that plagarism was taking even ideas and reusing them directly. Copying a sentence like that was an explicit example, even if generic. We were told that it gets suspicious at even 4 more complex words that are the same.
Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism.
Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.
Outside of academic contexts, the concept of plagiarism in itself doesn't make a lot of sense or have much meaning until it reaches what would otherwise be copyright infringement or involves trade secrets/non-disclosure agreements.
Nobody would care in a business meeting if you copied a random graph without citation or included data in a pitch deck. Reusing a presentation or publishing an article several times in trade publications with a bit of tweaking is pretty normal.
The underlying concept is using other people's ideas as your own. It's coherent and there's good reason for using it in academia, and probably also in journalism and creative writing.
How does ownership of ideas work again? And I don't mean citing sources when required, but the tracking and commodification of roots of experience external to existence in understanding.
You've got to be trained in mental gymnastics to jump through those logical hoops.
You don't need mental gymnastics, and you don't need to believe that people can own ideas or that they should be commodified (though it's fine if you do). You just need to understand that people deserve credit for the ideas they came up with. This is particularly important for academics, who live or die by their ideas.
Yeah I think the recent conservative witch hunts on liberal academics in American may have set this off as a weak point to attack of those who have more academic degrees. I assume the opposite will take off eventually as well.
I assume it is a combo of schools wanting to extract more original output and wanting to know precisely where an idea originated/was originally published, i.e. which paper.
I don't know. When I give a presentation I try to credit people for major ideas or other contributions. If I didn't it probably wouldn't be taken nearly as seriously as in an academic context but it's still a good practice.
Schools may have codes of conduct that implicitly or explicitly prohibit turning in the same paper for multiple classes. A publishing contract may specify that an article is original.
As others have mentioned though reusing both your own and other product descriptions, explainers, slides/data, etc. especially within a single company is pretty normal and accepted.
Self-plagiarism is not the same as stealing someone else's ideas, but it is still ethically wrong if you are e.g. selling an academic article to one publisher, when it is really just an already published article of yours with the title changed.
The more interesting question is whether he lifted entire plots from other books or just used the collage-of-website-text to fill specific details
This just looks like a sloppy writer saving time on understanding typical California mansion layouts and features or how snipers set up or British music in the 1990s or what Juarez is like by minimally revising the first Google result he found to generate the descriptive passage. But how a sniper sets up might not be the only bit he's taken from a book about a sniper, and a couple of evocative bits of description in a parody article not the only bits he's taken from Bond.
Yeah, I think that’s a more relevant question to the whole plagiarism thing. It may be that it’s just easier to show little sentences in the Reddit post.
I guess it's also easier to argue an author serendipitously ended up with the same trope-heavy story beats as Live and Let Die or Dr No in their spy thriller than it is to argue they serendipitously ended up with references to "the harlequinade of youth" and "fur-skinned Afghans" in a street scene. But the former is even lazier writing
Understandably, many people are worried about the cheapening of their trades. Why go through the effort when you don't have to to meet a sniper and interview them for their training and experiences, or consult the world's foremost expert on niche period architecture (how we met? oh, it's quite a story) when you have the internet?
The thorn is that evidence of effective literature doesn't exist as an objective truth, but it often looks like sales. Writers who spend their careers being honest, thoughtful, and meticulous don't publish 20 books in two years, and they often don't make as much money as the Mark Dawsons. The business of being someone who manufactures and sells works of fiction in today's world is not radically different than ever in history, and it signals not the collapse, but the return of writing under our new publication and distribution models.
Pulps are not new, like light novels, themed writing periodicals, or any other historical light published media. They took a break for about 20 years as things moved online, and they've experienced a resurgence as web serials, ebooks, and KPD partners. I'm not surprised or offended by any of that, or the Mark Dawsons, even if I have no interest in their products. But then again, I'm not vested in the old models and afraid of disruption.
Not defending the practice, but this guy writes the modern equivalent of pulp fiction. I doubt his readers care much, and he has no publisher to tick off. So what it comes down to is whether or not the people he stole from have a strong case to sue him for copyright infringement.
“The modern equivalent of pulp fiction…” is pulp fiction. It isn’t some antique term connoting a dross sui generis (as that’s an oxymoron). Pablum is literacy’s unalterable, insuperable attendant.
Pulp fiction was fiction written for the popular pulp magazines of the 1900s through roughly the 1960s. Those magazines don't really exist anymore. The "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- which is to say, the modern equivalent of writing for the pulps, writing to earn a quick buck -- is self-publishing low-effort fare on Kindle Unlimited or something similar. So the guy you were responding to made an apt comparison, IMO.
Interestingly, the pulps that are still hanging on -- like Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and like various other fiction magazines -- are today characterized by a very high standard of literary quality. On average, miles better than the self-published Kindle Unlimited stuff that rates highly (for some reason) on Amazon.
I realize well how pedantic I am being, but let's say there are two ways to interpret the term "pulp fiction." (1) As a reference to the pulp stories on newsstand racks in the early-mid 20th century; (2) as you note, as a stand-in for low-quality mass-produced fiction.
As such there should be absolutely no issue with somebody saying "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- because they're using the first definition. And it so happens that there is a perfect modern equivalent, which is essentially the author in OP's publishing style.
I have really never understood how you can fall for people with how to get rich guides.
Just do your own thing. Dont look at others too much. Rich wont make you happy anyway.
If your attitude is to become rich and your current situation is unhappy you wont be happy. You probably wont get rich as well. Wrong attitudes causes a lot of people to remain in their bubble full of jealously behavior. Most rich people dont give a damn about money. They do care about what the do and most have some passion in that. Thats what makes you happy. Not the money.
I think this one is a little more nuanced than that. I haven't bought any of Dawson's courses and definitely don't plan to now, but this is not a person advertising a "get-rich-quick" scheme. At least not from the impression I've gotten from his podcast. Plenty of people pay for courses, coaching, etc in the tech space. Some of those are scammy, and others are people just legitimately teaching you what they know and not making flowery promises about it. It's the same in other industries.
At the same time, I'm always suspicious by default of someone selling these kinds of things, even if they aren't obvious "I will make you rich" claims. If someone seems to be making more income from teaching people to do a thing than actually doing that thing, I get wary. Of course this has nuance as well - I would not be inherently suspicious of a university professor teaching full time. But a self-published author teaching you to run Facebook ads? Good educators _do_ exist in that space, but there needs to be a smell test there.
As for "doing your own thing", if you have a goal-oriented reason for doing something you can benefit from seeing how other people successfully did that thing. Sure, you can bumble along on your own "doing your own thing" and eventually luck out or figure it out (or maybe not), but often that tends to be a bad strategy.
The reason they're not accusing them of copyright infringement is presumably that a few sentences allegedly lifted with modifications from other books won't rise to that level.
Perhaps UK law is different, but presumably this is just something that might make you unpopular among other authors and literary critics, not a civil or criminal matter.
Plagiarism isn't illegal. Copyright infringement is. My guess: the award you get when somebody paraphrases your sentence doesn't cover the cost of litigation.
If this is done in the UK, I'd be very wary of receiving a libel lawsuit. Saying someone is a serial plagiarist is a damning accusation to an author, and examples I read (and TBH I got bored after the first 5 or 6) were rather tenuous: turns of phrase or even just a common adjective-noun pair.
I'm not really convinced by this or several other recent plagiarism scandals.
I have some experience of using the automated tools and I think people get a false sense of confidence from them, both in the sense of "this was definately copied from X" (rather than a shared original source) and "this is morally wrong, because the computer said so".
The example of the music description for example. It's obviously lifted from that source. The rephrasing doesn't really make sense, which I feel is a bigger crime than lifting a sentence about a music scene from a factual music source to use in a novel.
At least as how plagiarism was defined for me in school, it is a extremely unforgiving and sensitive standard. Having more than 5 shared words could be plagiarism. An idea taken could be plagiarism. Reusing work between classes that you wrote could be plagiarism.
So I guess it depends on how plagiarism is defined and perhaps how we define it should be revisited, but whether it be Christine Gay, Neri Oxman, or Mark Dawson, by that standard they are all caught red handed plagiarists.
On the other hand, only in cases of egregious and intentional plagiarism was it considered a major failing.
There's a lot of seemingly random instances though, like the first ones which seem oddly specific, flowery descriptions. I'm having a hard time believing those phrases coincidentally came out the same. If we're to believe op who claims they only checked the first couple pages of each book which were free to access, this seems quite damning.
Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from stackoverflow.
But then again I'm not a writer or expert on this, so I don't know how serious this is compared to a thesis or something where this would already cost you your title.
I'm not a writer either and I know nothing about plagiarism, but it would seem harsh to judge a novelist by the same standard as an academic.
Academics are expected to use citations, not primarily because reusing a 5-word phrase would in itself be problematic, but because it's important for other scientists to be able to trace the idea back to its original context.
Novelists on the other hand can't just include a footnote reference at the end of each sentence. And borrowing bits and pieces from other artists is completely normal, even desirable, in many arts. It's how the art form evolves.
The context here though is someone who churns out a lot of books and seems to have a real pattern of lifting a lot of phrases and descriptions near-verbatim from other places. This isn't an author lifting some particularly evocative phrase that they liked.
The context of my response was the parent comment, which mentioned academic writing in comparison.
I haven't read any of this author's books nor have I read the books he is supposed to have lifted these phrases from. So I don't really have an opinion on this particular case.
I guess it would depend on whether he has reused more than some isolated sequences of words from a particular novel. What makes a novel unique for me is mostly the story and the characters.
I still don't see how this is a crime though, I mean sure, he has a sense of inspiration and borrows sentences and phrases from somewhere. But, that doesn't mean the entire plots of his books, or the primary reason they sell is because of him stealing a few sentences from others.
I still don't see how this is a crime though, I mean sure, he has a sense of inspiration and borrows sentences and phrases from somewhere. But, that doesn't mean the entire plots of his books, or the primary reason they sell is because of him stealing a few sentences from others.
1. How much of other people's work did Mark Dawson plagiarise in each of his books?
2. How much of other people's work would someone need to plagiarise before you consider it to be unethical?
We can't answer 1. just yet, but if you are going to make a judgement about him here, at least try to give your answer for 2. The first question is a question of fact and the second question is a question of subjectivity so it's important to separate them out.
Genuinely asking: so if he basically copied the entirety of a Stephen king novel except he switched subject and verb ordering for all of the sentences, you don’t consider it at all unethical?
That would be copyright infringement. What’s with this trend of saying ‘genuinely asking’ that always seems to be followed by putting words in someone’s mouth? It’s the new less subtle version of ‘it sounds like you’re saying’.
It can be a thing but certainly a less serious thing than in academia. And what's presented here seems kind of scuzzy but probably isn't causing a lot of genuine harm.
If it wasn't for the dates I'd say that's LLM completion at play.
If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work.
Not sure I'd go quite as far as calling an author a plagiarist on the basis of specific short fragments matching. It would need bit more of an overarching say plotline matching or similar.
Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow?
Why not? Because, under the terms of use of StackOverflow, all posted code is licensed under a CC BY SA license.
You could, I suppose, add a CC BY SA acknowledgement to both StackOverflow, and the person who posted the code for every snippet of code you copy from StackOverflow in license notifications in your own project. You must acknowledge both. But you know you won't.
Instead, you will rely on the goodwill of every corporate overlord who will ever own StackOverflow, or inherit its copyright assignments for one Mickey Mouse copyright lifetime. Which seems unwise given that the current corporate overlords don't seem to be trustworthy. And seems particularly unwise now that the Millennial internet is passing away.
There was some discussion about allowing authors to post code under a dual-use license when StackoverFlow first converted their terms of use to require CC BY SA licensing. But whenever I add dual-use license notifications to my StackOverflow posts, StackOverflow moderators keep editing it out without my permission!
If the answer links to code on another site, then that code isn't covered by the StackOverflow terms of use.
> Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow?
How do you know it’s correct for your need without actually reading and internalizing it? It might even be correct…but not compute what you thought it does.
Plugging code from SO into your program is like assuming that if your program compiles it must be correct.
> If it wasn't for the dates I'd say that's LLM completion at play.
This is a clue that the current fashion of crying ChatGPT at every instance of bad writing is quite silly. Plagiarism, and bad writing in general, predate LLMs by centuries.
This is plagiarism by any academic or artistic standard, but as a commercial or legal matter, this level of copying doesn't come close to copyright infringement. And no one should want it to.
Although, I did find it odd the redditor suggested YouTubers and internet personalities as potential avenues for dissemination, since those are the people who make their careers not off the originality of their content, but their ability to do what Mark Dawson has done: quickly assimilate information and arguments, assemble into compelling narratives, and monetize amplification of engagement through networking and modern mechanisms.
I wouldn't even be so sure that it qualifies as real academic plagiarism. Some of the recent newsworthy examples from Harvard, for instance, were close to full paragraphs.
This example, for instance, is just a phrase and a cliche at that:
“A majestic wrought iron gate brought in from a Southern plantation”
The accuser can't even get little details like the number of books sold versus downloaded.
I've sat on academic committees judging plagiarism and I would not consider these examples to be an obvious case. Not by any means.
Indeed it shows that the author is a hack and would flunk out of an academic program but taking phrases from other authors is inevitable.
Writers are allowed to write "It was a dark and a stormy night" over again.
Maybe the author liked the expression "fur-trimmed Afghans" - maybe he had the other author's book in front of him maybe he read it the previous day who knows?
As long as he is not copying whole pages verbatim and the end product is enjoyable this is not actionable.
There are plenty of authors who might be good plotters but stink at character development and vice versa.
Two or three words - your examples - I can agree with.
But it stretches credulity when you start applying that to phrases like "the gaudy harlequinade of youth much in evidence", "The man settled behind the rifle. He felt the tension in the trigger, found his stockweld and slid up to the eyepiece, staring into it and seeing the ridge and the trees and the vegetation through the mil-dot-rich reticle.", or "the misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline".
Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist.
And then media jumped on the wagon and started checking everyone. A second minister is now also in trouble after not only having plagiarized, but then invented source interviews (aka science fraud).
Plagiarism is a form of lying. Politicians are liars. No surprise that plagiarism in political circles is rampant. Quite often such MS and PhD thesis are written by "ghost writers" for a fee. Politicians are busy advancing their political careers and a degree is needed just for its title not its content. PhD as a modern form of aristocratic title :-)
It seems nowadays a lot of politicians are effectively groomed for such a career from their teens when they see early success in some youth organisation. Sometimes a part of that process is to acquire some kind of academic background for them, justly earned or not.
Ed. I checked and both Sandra Borch and Ingvild Kjerkol seem to have been active in party politics from an early age. Exactly fits the mold of groomed career politicians.
I got accused of plagiarizing myself once, and I've never even figured out what that phrase means.
Isn't the assumption supposed to be that anything I haven't cited is my idea? What does it matter if it's not the first time I had the idea? It's not less mine because I still have it.
I could sort of understand if I had published it somewhere and somehow given rights to it to another party, but this was just some random college philosophy paper.
When did newness become part of the definition? It's not on the etymological history of the word. It's not in dictionary definitions of the word. Where is this coming from?
That includes citing your work that is unpublished (there are valid ways to cite unpublished work), and building on it which would be fine in many cases.
Whose definition is this "newness"? Plagiarism is about passing other people's work off as your own. It comes from a Greek root about kidnapping, not about how old something is.
Your observation about the root of the word might be accurate, but (in my personal view unfortunately) is not relevant. "Plagiarism" is now used to describe previously published (and in some cases unpublished!) work that is being "recycled", regardless of author, without explicitly noting it to be such.
I'm not defending the usage, I'm simply explaining how the term is now used. Language mutates, origins are lost, and usage evolves.
You may choose to quote dictionary definitions, but dictionaries document usage, and of necessity can never be fully up-to-date with more recent changes. This is especially true when the terms are being interpreted within a specific context. In many academic environments "self-plagiarism" is an adaptation of the original concept to indicate that students cannot repeatedly submit the same work over and over again. They will say something like "Work for this accreditation must be new and original" and then use the term "self-plagiarism" to describe when that stipulation is breached.
As I say, language evolves. People even say "The proof is in the pudding" and "I could care less". These are idioms that convey meaning as an entirety and are not to be interpreted according to the meaning of the words therein.
Similarly, now in some contexts "self-plagiarism" is a term used to describe recycling one's own work. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's not.
Love it, like it, or loathe it, the term exists and describes "A Thing(tm)".
This is why I'm asking whose definition it is. Whose idea was it to start using this term, which had a useful and important definition for generations, to refer to something else now, and then act as though everyone should just know this?
I'd assume it would have had to be somebody pretty important, for their fiat to have such weight. I'd like to know who it was.
I'm sure you can use on-line search tools to find where and when the term first appeared on the internet. My suspicion is that the phenomenon was being discussed informally between people who assess students' work, someone used the term "plagiarism", someone will have pointed out that it was "plagiarising" the student's own work, so the prefix was added, and stuck.
It's a concept that needs a name, and when a name turns up it often spreads quickly with no obvious source.
Assume you write a bachelor thesis on topic X. Then, move universities (or professors, whatever), and write more or less the same thesis again to get a masters degree.
The problem with that is that it’s academic dishonesty. You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do. Transfer the self-plagiarism situation to another context, say you self-publish a book and re-use some material from another book you wrote. The fact of self-plagiarism may still exist but in this new context it’s not clear that the harm does (whereas copying another writer’s words is still clearly harmful.)
If I turn in the same project for two different courses without flagging it, that's considered a violation of many academic (teaching) integrity codes. Similarly if you hire me to write a bespoke piece of software (with copyright assigned to you) and I re-use code I've delivered to other clients, that could be considered a damaging violation of our contract. You could refer to both of these cases as "self-plagiarism", but that's just a phrase: the actual harm caused by it is very specific to the context it occurs in. (And any punishments/opprobrium we assign to it should be similarly context-dependent.)
There's a difference between a school writing up its own set of conduct rules and plagiarism.
Any two entities can agree to any set of terms they want. If a school says you have to sign a code of conduct to go there, and it prohibits submitting the same work for more than one course, fine. If someone breaks that rule, accuse them of violating the code of conduct.
But that's not plagiarism. "Self-plagiarism" is a contradiction in terms.
I don't like the term either, and what I'm trying to say is that whereas "plagiarism" is always (to some extent) a bad thing - since we should not steal others' work without credit - "self-plagiarism" is only problematic in specific contexts. It would be better not to use such a loaded term.
It's also important to understand that many of the lessons we are taught in school about attribution are deliberately over-emphasized by instructors, in order to impart good citation habits. If frightening students to death about "self-plagiarism" causes them to be unnecessarily forthright in citing their own work, even outside the classroom context, instructors are mostly fine with that.
Let's phrase it differently: how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit?
The issue with self plagiarism isn't that you are quoting your own previous work (you are free to do that), it's because you're not tagging it as a citation and thereby passing it off as new.
> how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit?
As many as it meets the requirements for.
Heck, I submitted the exact same "tell us about a significant experience in your life" story to every single university I applied for.
And I guarantee the teachers are duplicating lessons or parts of lessons when they teach related classes. Have you ever seen a professor cite, "Me, the first time I taught this class"?
That's just being smart and efficient. I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of these examples.
The avoidance of self-plagiarism isn't some kind of honour code for all aspects of life - it only applies to the specific case of a paper to submit for academic credit. The examples you describe have nothing to do with that, of course.
>As many as it meets the requirements for.
What I'm trying to tell you is that it normally won't meet the requirements a second time. It's usually part of the university's examination regulations that a paper has to be original. Everything else is seen as an attempt of scientific deception that consequently can and will be treated as a violation of regulations.
But I have to admit I'm not sure if that's a universal rule, or just where I'm from. I suspect we might be having some kind of cultural divide at play here. May I ask what part of the world you're in?
Scientific deception? It was a philosophy paper (in my original post). There weren't any scientific claims. I just made a statement in one paper that I had previously made about the same topic in a different paper.
If I had taken two classes that both requested an essay on the symbolism of Plato's cave, I'd be stoked I already had one at the ready. Wouldn't even occur to me that there was some problem with it. But even that isn't what happened in my original post that prompted the question.
I'm in the U.S., and I was pursuing my degree at a university people have heard of in New England (but not the one that probably first comes to mind, especially about this topic lately).
Thank you for the clarification. I suppose that explains it - as an engineer, I was naturally thinking of a pretty different kind of paper. I guess the same standards don't make sense for every field.
As a student anyway. Self plagiarism is a controversial topic in other circumstances. Many academics feel that if they described some element of an experiment some way it’s because that’s the best way they could imagine. If they do the experiment in some other way, or write up something for other publications or whatever it would be absurd to not take their own sentences if they want.
Many academics do not believe that this is necessary. Maybe the experiment example is a bad one, since it would make sense to cite a related experiment. Perhaps writing a pop science article that uses a paragraph from a paper they wrote is a better example.
But I think my example would not be acceptable for a student. You may not re-use a paragraph you wrote, even if you cite it. Double submission is often treated similarly to plagiarism.
My main point is that what is and isn’t plagiarism is contested, outside of high school and undergraduate students.
> But I think my example would not be acceptable for a student. You may not re-use a paragraph you wrote, even if you cite it. Double submission is often treated similarly to plagiarism.
Why not? That's the part I (top level commenter) have never understood.
Why am I limited to having or expressing my ideas in one venue only, and only once? Why don't I have unlimited right to use my own thoughts as often as I care to?
I'll grant your definition of plagiarism. Now, under this definition (which differs from what any layman would think of "plagiarism" as) explain why plagiarism is bad. Who exactly is harmed when I repeat my own words?
Most answers here show a misunderstanding of both "plagiarism" and the basis for granting advanced degrees. Research degrees are granted to persons who have demonstrated ability to produce work meeting some standard. It does not matter if the work was done some time earlier, and for a different purpose. There are many examples of people granted a PhD based on work done in a non-academic setting and then repackaged for the thesis.
The implication is that it's large paragraphs of solid work stolen from a fellow researcher in the field. But it could just as easily mean 22% of her text was scattered with cliches, idioms and excerpts from legislation (or other standard texts) if someone with an agenda was interpreting the results.
No, you don't need to cite cliches. Nor do you need to paraphrase legislation or other technical texts so obliquely that not a single phrase of it will be detected by a text matching algorithm.
Nor do the tools have a human level understanding of what has or has not been cited properly.
The 'talk' page of that article is completely empty and not a single one of the citations is in English. For all intents and purposes you're taking everything written there on pure faith because the chance that some uninterested observer has double-checked all of those citations is basically zero.
The original attribution is not W.E.B. Du Bois as he was born February 23, 1868.
The 1857 book "A polyglot of foreign proverbs : comprising French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish, with English translations and a general index" has that quote in the index, on page 413 at https://archive.org/details/b24867664/page/412/mode/2up?q=%2... .
On page 354 you can see it's described as a Danish proverb, https://archive.org/details/b24867664/page/354/mode/2up?q=do... : "Den leder ikke gierne bag Dören, som ei selv har staaet der. A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself"
It is. In this case though, we're talking the wholesale lifting of entire passages of text from other people's theses. I think the tally is up to 22% currently of her thesis being copied without attribution from other sources.
I've read a couple of Dawson books in the John Milton series but gave up as The Grey Man covers similar ground and seems mostly better crafted.
Not to excuse anything but would be interesting to understand if some of this is potentially a result of using automated tools; I don't actually know what pulp writers use in their work.
And The Gray Man (by Mark Greaney) was awful, just a series of events seemingly conceived to demonstrate that the protagonist was indeed a badass, over and over. After awhile, the protagonist became Steven Seagal in my mind's eye. Had to quit before I finished.
I’m not sure I understand what Mark Dawson is supposed to have done. There’s only so many ways to say the thing he’s trying to say and fiction authors don’t cite other authors for turns of phrase.
One of the really interesting comments in the books subreddit chain was someone who was kicked out of his 20 books to 50k group. Apparently the group was discussing the idea of using Fivrr to get content for free - I think this context makes some of these examples much more clear - someone strapped for time just copy and pasting whatever they can in to get a gig. Here is the comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/comment/kf...
194 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadIt has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old. If the content was a couple days newer would there be value in commenting “(2024)”?
Beyond that, everything on that page has explicit exact dates. It’s Reddit. We can read the actual date and not just the year ourselves.
(That person's comment was benign, in my opinion, because the mods are going to manually hide this subthread anyway—it's a minor and short-lived distraction. It's a pretty common interaction on HN: there's a meta-discussion about the HN submission itself, "please edit the title / please change the URL to this one / please whatever", and 'dang steps in and says "Thanks! Fixed", and then he kills the subthread because it's no longer relevant. I feel this status quo is basically okay?)
[0] Many examples, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=2023&dateStart=1704103200&date...
Not OP. Just food for thought.
> He runs the Self Publishing Formula course and podcast, he talks at the 20BooksTo50K conference in Vegas, and he’s part of a new initiative called Fuse Publishing. He’s a pretty big deal in self-publishing, so what he does reflects on self-publishing as a whole.
Like instagram "buy my course to learn how I got rich" finance-influencers, the same old quip seemingly applies to self-publishing..: don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are.
From what I remember the city of Portland at least had such a dirth of units being offered for section 8 due to many landlords having had their units trashed or otherwise fearful of the general bad press about section 8 tenants that there’s not a lot landlords willing to participate in the program leading to a lack of supply.
The upside for landlords though is that the govt pays the rent and it’s often a higher amount than one might get otherwise. There are of course downsides.
Seems an awful lot like he’s trying to give himself a better image by editing his own wikipedia page! Smells conman
My mother-in-law wanted us to go with her to a seminar hosted/ sponsored/ affiliated with one of the house flippers on TV.
They of course talked about their course on how to do it.
And they talked about how "nearly 8,000 people have done this!" and that if you did, too, you'd have access to their financing which, "has given our members over $100M to buy houses to flip! Some of them have flipped 20+ homes with us!" Cue oohs and ahhs.
Because $100M seems a lot. Until you're talking houses. Because in most areas in the country, even a workable flipper house is still going to be $100K, at a minimum. And $100M only buys you 1,000 houses.
Hmm. 8,000 people have paid $5,999 to do your course. And you've flipped 1,000 houses, some people doing 20+ each. That means that realistically, less than one-in-ten of the people who paid for your course ever flip a house.
So yeah, they made a not shabby amount on the costs and interests of those loans...
... and $48M "teaching" people to get rich by flipping homes.
Always good advice. Someone sent me one of those day trader Bros that constantly shows their Lambo and I immediately saw warning lights. I had to tell my buddy that he didn't get the Lambo trading...he got it off suckers who think there's a magical formula for average Joe to make millions with nearly zero risk.
Or, hypothetically, he could have rented it for cheaper and then bought an actual one with the money from the suckers.
It's amazing how some people can pull a long con.
Fake it till you make it.
---
[0]: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=tai+lop...
Why not just use it on himself instead? This guy has paid money out of the kindness of his heart to make sure the public knows about this bulletproof money making technique.
Some will show you their revenue, "I'm a six figure author!" But frequently hide how much they spend on ads or editing. Or try to hide that they're making ~$50k on courses/affiliate sales and their net is... ~$50k. Writing is a net zero income for them and most of it is just used to sell courses/products.
What bothers me most is that promotion is so important for solo entrepreneurs, that some people will placate the grifters in return for exposure. It's hard to call people out. We end up in a place where everyone is selling to everyone else.
Am a little surprised it hasn't been done yet tbh. Might be a fun project.
So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!
What's more - self-plagiarism has been a huge topic in the university sector and the Minister has been quite strict towards students re-using text on exams without citation (to their own previous exams), with several cases going to the court.
[1] https://e24.no/norsk-oekonomi/i/wA1Kvo/saa-mye-av-sandra-bor...
[2] https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/y6Wzw2/deler-av-forskningsminis...
Can you provide an example of an incident like this?
Whether this is "screwing up the quotes" or not depends on your perspective.
The post only refers to excerpts of long-winded descriptions of stuff, not to large plots or entire paragraphs plagiarized.
Is that very different from asking ChatGPT to generate a thorough description of a situation and using this? Would that be plagiarism too?
If he wasn't selling it, maybe.
The scumbaggery is endemic, not isolated to creative repurposing of other people's sentences!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud
> 1. (law) The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.
> 2. Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved or unlawful gain.
> ...
There's no implication that he crossed out a number on a report before artificially enhancing it by increasing it by 400, is there?
I feel that both of these examples are reprehensible in this context, but that only one of them rises to the level of fraud.
(I mean: There are companies performing stock buybacks all the time for various reasons, and some of those reasons can include improving the market's perception of that stock's value.)
This happens in the US too (esp nonfiction, and political stuff).
To be financial successful as a writer (or any creative endeavor), if you do not have special access, you must either gain special access or get into the business of publishing yourself.
As noble as “gain access” may seem by comparison, it has very few seats on the ride & the power law seems to have the perverse effect of narrowing the number over time.
The business of publishing is & has always been substantially about manufacturing hype. You might get one generational talent at its start, but mostly you are selling the talent you have.
As much as we all seem to want opportunity to be earned on meritocracy alone, we don’t spread our attention that way and we certainly don’t distribute in any kind of premeditated way to ensure our values are applied to society. Perhaps algorithmic content distribution will change that one day, but so far it mostly hasn’t.
So for any new work, even for authors you know & love, to get sufficient revenue it has to grab significant attention in a brief period of time.
Underlying all hype machines is usually some kind of gameable metric of attention - views, endorsements, critical review.
All publishers have a formula for how they get some of it or they fail at their job. Publishers will be the first to tell you what they do isn’t enough because everyone does it.
“New York Times Best Seller” is a great example. Generally considered a fair standard of what is interesting, it mostly drifts off Amazon rankings with some mollifying factors.
Part of the durability of this system is that when one person has been found to hack those rankings, like here by purchasing 400 of their own books, it appears that they are a dishonest person gaming the system.
Every NYT Best Selling author I’ve met either personally orchestrated, or had it done for them, volume book sales to friend’s businesses & conferences to achieve the same affect.
Perhaps people who are insufficiently clever should be morally punished for the crime of showing us our own foibles.
But the “scumbaggery is endemic,” which is now one of my favorite sentences, is as easily cast as disapproval for a few people as it is a statement of how people in large groups choose what is interesting to talk about.
Either way, we’ve got no solution for society working the way we think it does vs working to exploit the way we think it does.
I thought the Internet might, but so far it seems better at distributing the latter than solving for the former.
Originality is the art of hiding your sources, which has become utterly impossible nowadays with the search engines.
If he had studied after the 2010s, he would have paraphrased a bit more to confuse google
Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism.
Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.
As a high school student, this is still true. People literally get suspended/expelled for plagiarism.
Nobody would care in a business meeting if you copied a random graph without citation or included data in a pitch deck. Reusing a presentation or publishing an article several times in trade publications with a bit of tweaking is pretty normal.
How does ownership of ideas work again? And I don't mean citing sources when required, but the tracking and commodification of roots of experience external to existence in understanding.
You've got to be trained in mental gymnastics to jump through those logical hoops.
Specially ideas. Which cannot be copyrighted (yet).
Somebody show cage Michael Tomasello right now. Open any of his books and you’ll see a series of self-plagiarism sentences.
I now think he’s just a genius because he’s investigated his field in depth
But happily it is not a concept outside academia.
Schools may have codes of conduct that implicitly or explicitly prohibit turning in the same paper for multiple classes. A publishing contract may specify that an article is original.
As others have mentioned though reusing both your own and other product descriptions, explainers, slides/data, etc. especially within a single company is pretty normal and accepted.
This just looks like a sloppy writer saving time on understanding typical California mansion layouts and features or how snipers set up or British music in the 1990s or what Juarez is like by minimally revising the first Google result he found to generate the descriptive passage. But how a sniper sets up might not be the only bit he's taken from a book about a sniper, and a couple of evocative bits of description in a parody article not the only bits he's taken from Bond.
The thorn is that evidence of effective literature doesn't exist as an objective truth, but it often looks like sales. Writers who spend their careers being honest, thoughtful, and meticulous don't publish 20 books in two years, and they often don't make as much money as the Mark Dawsons. The business of being someone who manufactures and sells works of fiction in today's world is not radically different than ever in history, and it signals not the collapse, but the return of writing under our new publication and distribution models.
Pulps are not new, like light novels, themed writing periodicals, or any other historical light published media. They took a break for about 20 years as things moved online, and they've experienced a resurgence as web serials, ebooks, and KPD partners. I'm not surprised or offended by any of that, or the Mark Dawsons, even if I have no interest in their products. But then again, I'm not vested in the old models and afraid of disruption.
Pulp fiction was fiction written for the popular pulp magazines of the 1900s through roughly the 1960s. Those magazines don't really exist anymore. The "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- which is to say, the modern equivalent of writing for the pulps, writing to earn a quick buck -- is self-publishing low-effort fare on Kindle Unlimited or something similar. So the guy you were responding to made an apt comparison, IMO.
Interestingly, the pulps that are still hanging on -- like Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and like various other fiction magazines -- are today characterized by a very high standard of literary quality. On average, miles better than the self-published Kindle Unlimited stuff that rates highly (for some reason) on Amazon.
As such there should be absolutely no issue with somebody saying "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- because they're using the first definition. And it so happens that there is a perfect modern equivalent, which is essentially the author in OP's publishing style.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/the-bi...
At the same time, I'm always suspicious by default of someone selling these kinds of things, even if they aren't obvious "I will make you rich" claims. If someone seems to be making more income from teaching people to do a thing than actually doing that thing, I get wary. Of course this has nuance as well - I would not be inherently suspicious of a university professor teaching full time. But a self-published author teaching you to run Facebook ads? Good educators _do_ exist in that space, but there needs to be a smell test there.
As for "doing your own thing", if you have a goal-oriented reason for doing something you can benefit from seeing how other people successfully did that thing. Sure, you can bumble along on your own "doing your own thing" and eventually luck out or figure it out (or maybe not), but often that tends to be a bad strategy.
Perhaps UK law is different, but presumably this is just something that might make you unpopular among other authors and literary critics, not a civil or criminal matter.
I have some experience of using the automated tools and I think people get a false sense of confidence from them, both in the sense of "this was definately copied from X" (rather than a shared original source) and "this is morally wrong, because the computer said so".
The example of the music description for example. It's obviously lifted from that source. The rephrasing doesn't really make sense, which I feel is a bigger crime than lifting a sentence about a music scene from a factual music source to use in a novel.
So I guess it depends on how plagiarism is defined and perhaps how we define it should be revisited, but whether it be Christine Gay, Neri Oxman, or Mark Dawson, by that standard they are all caught red handed plagiarists.
On the other hand, only in cases of egregious and intentional plagiarism was it considered a major failing.
Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from stackoverflow.
But then again I'm not a writer or expert on this, so I don't know how serious this is compared to a thesis or something where this would already cost you your title.
Academics are expected to use citations, not primarily because reusing a 5-word phrase would in itself be problematic, but because it's important for other scientists to be able to trace the idea back to its original context.
Novelists on the other hand can't just include a footnote reference at the end of each sentence. And borrowing bits and pieces from other artists is completely normal, even desirable, in many arts. It's how the art form evolves.
I haven't read any of this author's books nor have I read the books he is supposed to have lifted these phrases from. So I don't really have an opinion on this particular case.
I guess it would depend on whether he has reused more than some isolated sequences of words from a particular novel. What makes a novel unique for me is mostly the story and the characters.
1. How much of other people's work did Mark Dawson plagiarise in each of his books?
2. How much of other people's work would someone need to plagiarise before you consider it to be unethical?
We can't answer 1. just yet, but if you are going to make a judgement about him here, at least try to give your answer for 2. The first question is a question of fact and the second question is a question of subjectivity so it's important to separate them out.
If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work.
Not sure I'd go quite as far as calling an author a plagiarist on the basis of specific short fragments matching. It would need bit more of an overarching say plotline matching or similar.
Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow?
You could, I suppose, add a CC BY SA acknowledgement to both StackOverflow, and the person who posted the code for every snippet of code you copy from StackOverflow in license notifications in your own project. You must acknowledge both. But you know you won't.
Instead, you will rely on the goodwill of every corporate overlord who will ever own StackOverflow, or inherit its copyright assignments for one Mickey Mouse copyright lifetime. Which seems unwise given that the current corporate overlords don't seem to be trustworthy. And seems particularly unwise now that the Millennial internet is passing away.
There was some discussion about allowing authors to post code under a dual-use license when StackoverFlow first converted their terms of use to require CC BY SA licensing. But whenever I add dual-use license notifications to my StackOverflow posts, StackOverflow moderators keep editing it out without my permission!
If the answer links to code on another site, then that code isn't covered by the StackOverflow terms of use.
How do you know it’s correct for your need without actually reading and internalizing it? It might even be correct…but not compute what you thought it does.
Plugging code from SO into your program is like assuming that if your program compiles it must be correct.
I wish I could add a sarcasm marker but I see chunks of dumb code inserted in public repos, NPM, etc all the time.
I can only hope that my bank’s phone app has been subject to reasonable code review.
This is a clue that the current fashion of crying ChatGPT at every instance of bad writing is quite silly. Plagiarism, and bad writing in general, predate LLMs by centuries.
This example, for instance, is just a phrase and a cliche at that:
“A majestic wrought iron gate brought in from a Southern plantation”
The accuser can't even get little details like the number of books sold versus downloaded.
I've sat on academic committees judging plagiarism and I would not consider these examples to be an obvious case. Not by any means.
Writers are allowed to write "It was a dark and a stormy night" over again.
Maybe the author liked the expression "fur-trimmed Afghans" - maybe he had the other author's book in front of him maybe he read it the previous day who knows?
As long as he is not copying whole pages verbatim and the end product is enjoyable this is not actionable.
There are plenty of authors who might be good plotters but stink at character development and vice versa.
But it stretches credulity when you start applying that to phrases like "the gaudy harlequinade of youth much in evidence", "The man settled behind the rifle. He felt the tension in the trigger, found his stockweld and slid up to the eyepiece, staring into it and seeing the ridge and the trees and the vegetation through the mil-dot-rich reticle.", or "the misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline".
And then media jumped on the wagon and started checking everyone. A second minister is now also in trouble after not only having plagiarized, but then invented source interviews (aka science fraud).
Or, "I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer" - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
Ed. I checked and both Sandra Borch and Ingvild Kjerkol seem to have been active in party politics from an early age. Exactly fits the mold of groomed career politicians.
Isn't the assumption supposed to be that anything I haven't cited is my idea? What does it matter if it's not the first time I had the idea? It's not less mine because I still have it.
I could sort of understand if I had published it somewhere and somehow given rights to it to another party, but this was just some random college philosophy paper.
If I can't grant myself rights to my work, then who can?
If you're not doing that then I would assume it's fine?
You can quote any previous work, others and/or your own, but you must highlight/identify it as such.
I'm not defending the usage, I'm simply explaining how the term is now used. Language mutates, origins are lost, and usage evolves.
You may choose to quote dictionary definitions, but dictionaries document usage, and of necessity can never be fully up-to-date with more recent changes. This is especially true when the terms are being interpreted within a specific context. In many academic environments "self-plagiarism" is an adaptation of the original concept to indicate that students cannot repeatedly submit the same work over and over again. They will say something like "Work for this accreditation must be new and original" and then use the term "self-plagiarism" to describe when that stipulation is breached.
As I say, language evolves. People even say "The proof is in the pudding" and "I could care less". These are idioms that convey meaning as an entirety and are not to be interpreted according to the meaning of the words therein.
Similarly, now in some contexts "self-plagiarism" is a term used to describe recycling one's own work. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's not.
Love it, like it, or loathe it, the term exists and describes "A Thing(tm)".
I'd assume it would have had to be somebody pretty important, for their fiat to have such weight. I'd like to know who it was.
It's a concept that needs a name, and when a name turns up it often spreads quickly with no obvious source.
Assume you write a bachelor thesis on topic X. Then, move universities (or professors, whatever), and write more or less the same thesis again to get a masters degree.
That’s self plagiarism.
This doesn't sound true if you're copying your own work surely? If that's the case it must by definition be work that you did, right?
Any two entities can agree to any set of terms they want. If a school says you have to sign a code of conduct to go there, and it prohibits submitting the same work for more than one course, fine. If someone breaks that rule, accuse them of violating the code of conduct.
But that's not plagiarism. "Self-plagiarism" is a contradiction in terms.
It's also important to understand that many of the lessons we are taught in school about attribution are deliberately over-emphasized by instructors, in order to impart good citation habits. If frightening students to death about "self-plagiarism" causes them to be unnecessarily forthright in citing their own work, even outside the classroom context, instructors are mostly fine with that.
The issue with self plagiarism isn't that you are quoting your own previous work (you are free to do that), it's because you're not tagging it as a citation and thereby passing it off as new.
As many as it meets the requirements for.
Heck, I submitted the exact same "tell us about a significant experience in your life" story to every single university I applied for.
And I guarantee the teachers are duplicating lessons or parts of lessons when they teach related classes. Have you ever seen a professor cite, "Me, the first time I taught this class"?
That's just being smart and efficient. I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of these examples.
>As many as it meets the requirements for.
What I'm trying to tell you is that it normally won't meet the requirements a second time. It's usually part of the university's examination regulations that a paper has to be original. Everything else is seen as an attempt of scientific deception that consequently can and will be treated as a violation of regulations.
But I have to admit I'm not sure if that's a universal rule, or just where I'm from. I suspect we might be having some kind of cultural divide at play here. May I ask what part of the world you're in?
If I had taken two classes that both requested an essay on the symbolism of Plato's cave, I'd be stoked I already had one at the ready. Wouldn't even occur to me that there was some problem with it. But even that isn't what happened in my original post that prompted the question.
I'm in the U.S., and I was pursuing my degree at a university people have heard of in New England (but not the one that probably first comes to mind, especially about this topic lately).
But I think my example would not be acceptable for a student. You may not re-use a paragraph you wrote, even if you cite it. Double submission is often treated similarly to plagiarism.
My main point is that what is and isn’t plagiarism is contested, outside of high school and undergraduate students.
Why not? That's the part I (top level commenter) have never understood.
Why am I limited to having or expressing my ideas in one venue only, and only once? Why don't I have unlimited right to use my own thoughts as often as I care to?
The implication is that it's large paragraphs of solid work stolen from a fellow researcher in the field. But it could just as easily mean 22% of her text was scattered with cliches, idioms and excerpts from legislation (or other standard texts) if someone with an agenda was interpreting the results.
Nor do the tools have a human level understanding of what has or has not been cited properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Borch_and_Ingvild_Kjerk...
The 'talk' page of that article is completely empty and not a single one of the citations is in English. For all intents and purposes you're taking everything written there on pure faith because the chance that some uninterested observer has double-checked all of those citations is basically zero.
"A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself." - W.E.B. Du Bois
The 1857 book "A polyglot of foreign proverbs : comprising French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish, with English translations and a general index" has that quote in the index, on page 413 at https://archive.org/details/b24867664/page/412/mode/2up?q=%2... .
On page 354 you can see it's described as a Danish proverb, https://archive.org/details/b24867664/page/354/mode/2up?q=do... : "Den leder ikke gierne bag Dören, som ei selv har staaet der. A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself"
That phrase is indeed in the 1850 book "Danske Ordsprog, Tankesprog og Riimsprog", p153, #2385 at https://archive.org/details/danskeordsprogt00copegoog/page/n... .
FWIW, the 1897 book "Men in epigram" attributes that quote to Henri Du Bois.
Not to excuse anything but would be interesting to understand if some of this is potentially a result of using automated tools; I don't actually know what pulp writers use in their work.
I originally saw this posted on the writing subreddit[1]. Looks like it picked up more steam on the books subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/did_bestse...