Word Theft
poetryfoundation.org
poetryfoundation.org
Can anyone find a copy of the plagiarized version by Christian Ward? I'd be very interested in seeing it.
1. Poetry seems like a medium that is inherently difficult not to plagiarize. Unlike regular prose or journalism, you don't have the room to do gracefully do attribution (e.g. "According to the Times, two roads diverged in a yellow wood") and the shortness of the phrase necessarily reduces the space you have to make something unique.
2. It's great to be involved in an intellectual pursuit, like open source software, where copying and remixing is not only encouraged, but is a best practice.
3. It says a lot about the ephemeral state and nature of poetry that someone could plagiarize Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, in this age of Google, and almost get away with it.
edit: poor wording on my part. I meant more that it's difficult to avoid unintentionally plagiarizing, in that the form of the medium seems to make it difficult to show that you were trying to "remix" (speaking from a layperson's perspective). The examples given in the OP seem to obviously be ripping off, though.
But yes, it also seems from a layperson's perspective that there would be collisions in how things could be expressed...but I'm thinking as a layperson who doesn't appreciate all the ways that poetry can break common rules of language and expression.
One solution I have seen to this though, is various annotated editions of poems which add footnotes to explain various references, things specific to that author's culture or time period etc. However, while these are certainly informative, they can be a bit distracting from the poem itself.
I believe this sort of expression (of remixing and building upon and expanding or contracting) is good and healthy and artistic and should be considered an acceptable aspect of creative expression. How original is original? The fact that we are using a common language already ties us to a past cultural history upon which we build up the meanings in what we say and write (i.e., unoriginal from the get go).
I think there are certainly varying degrees of similarity that can be seen in different bodies of writing; some closer to the exact words of others. But at the end of the day, how much does this really matter? I'm more interested in human expression, however it needs to be done, than quibbling over who did what first and by how much.
What little money can be had, yes, might want to be protected so that more art can be produced, and maybe fame can bring a mild sort of immortality to reward the struggling artist. But I don't think what compels us to write (or create) is something we do for fame or fortune. I think it's more to do with adding to the fabric of culture and playing a part in the drama of human history.
From what my university professor told me (and some student friends of mine, who had their works checked by such software on regular basis), plagiarism checking software is mostly a joke (or a scam, depending on how you look at it), and is bought so that the university can tell that they are "employing best available methods of plagiarism-protection" when applying for government money. At least, this is how it works in Poland.
Method b) is what, AFAIK, such software usually does, and from what I heard it generates tons of false positives and is generally annoying.
A student friend of mine told me about how much trouble she and her year has with the anti-plagiarism system her university uses; basically citing things or using the same reference material (and thus having similar references section) is enough to mark your thesis as plagiarism. They have a ruthlessly enforced threshold of "plagiarism %" you need to stay below, and from what she says, it's incredibly difficult to do so even when writing completely original work.
Sounds like your friend's school is misusing the tool. Seeing that students are all using the same references is pretty interesting information, as long as you don't leap to conclusions. Likewise, seeing that someone is not citing references properly may not be evidence of plagiarism but nevertheless it's good for students to adhere to reference standards. When I used Turnitin I had to keep below a certain percentge of 'quoted' text. I found this slightly annoying but I could easily avoid it by replacing a quotation with my own summary + a citation. It's just a stylistic choice that is being enforced through the system.
Also, no % of plagiarism should be acceptable - beyond the residual/accidental amount you get from coincidental phrasings.
I don't know how big their corpus of poems is though.
Someone handed out a paper that looked excellent, I read it before he read it aloud, and I didn't believe he wrote it. It was too good and seemed above something a high schooler would write. I changed my mind and believe he wrote it when he read it aloud because the way he read it, he owned it. He read it just like it was something he wrote himself. After he was done the teacher said "that was good, but you didn't write this, you downloaded this from the Internet." She didn't ask him, she didn't check, she just publicly accused him. He looked shocked and said "No I didn't!" where she just kept insisting he did without any proof whatsoever except that the paper was just good. She may have just blindly failed him on the assignment.
Off topic but other student in this assignment handed out another paper which was full of misspellings and grammatical errors. Absolutely chock full of them, to the point you could hardly read it. After she read it, the teacher said "there's a lot of misspellings" to which she protested "my computer doesn't have spellcheck." She really thought this was a legitimate excuse, in English class. Like not having spellcheck excuses you from 1) proofreading and 2) picking up and old fashioned paper dictionary.
IMHO there's too much emphasis placed on doing things the "right" way and not enough on actually getting things done. Even if I did simply trace the photo, I still would have had a learning experience, engaging pencil, hand, and paper and understanding a bit more about how they work (to me, the purpose of the assignment). Regardless of how a thing is made, if it actually gets made and gets into other people's heads and gives them an experience worth having, I think it has done its job.
I took up my dispute with the vice-principle along with my parents and redid the assignment on thick, opaque card-stock (that couldn't possibly be used to trace through) and reproduced another photo with just as much accuracy. I went on to attend art school and win illustration awards despite my horrible experiences with art in high school, but I worry that another student might have abandoned their pursuit of art and deprived the world of their creativity, given such negative feedback. I feel we all need to lighten up a bit.
http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2013/09/20/f-for-fake-poetry...
> According to media reports one of the judges, Anthony Lawrence, became suspicious and, with the help of another judge (M T C Cronin) started googling lines from Slattery’s poem. They discovered that about four-fifths of the lines appeared to be the work of other poets.
Copyright...?