Plagiarism

Gioia's 6th point I'm afraid I find rather baffling:

 

(6) Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard's president. But the authorities just take it for granted.


A healthy knowledge system requires honesty and accountability, and not long ago this was taken for granted. But plagiarism is now everywhere, and taken for granted. It’s even embedded in the dominant technologies and institutions.

Now hold on a minute. Plagiarism is as old as human language -- people don't normally give credit for repeating phrases or even entire stories that they've heard from someone else. In fact, the basic idea that an author has some sort of property right in their creation is a fairly modern invention. As we've been reading the Bible we've seen that many works don't have a credited author at all, and those that do were written by somebody else,  extensively re-written, often centuries after they were purportedly created. 

We have reliably creditable authorship going back to classical antiquity, but recycling other people's stories remained commonplace -- Shakespeare did it all the time. The novel Tristram Shandy, published in installments from from 1769 to 1777, contains many passages copied without attribution, word for word from Robert Burton, Francis Bacon and other writers. What's new is precisely that we don't tolerate this. The example Gioia gives, Claudine Gay, was fired from her job as president of Harvard because of somewhat dubious accusations of plagiarism.*

 

He does link to a story about large language models and yes, many copyright owners are suing their creators or at least complaining vociferously that they are expropriating proprietary material. I'm not sure that's exactly the right definition of the problem. They do provide citations, even if inaccurately, and very few human writers actually present original ideas. Ninety-nine percent of non-fiction writing consists of digestion, remixing, and restatement of existing knowledge and ideas. If you look in the back of the book, you'll find a bibliography. The boundaries of plagiarism are very difficult to define in writing, and even more difficult in music. So again, maybe there's a problem here somewhere, but I don't think Gioia has identified it correctly. 

 

* Actually what is puzzling about the whole Claudine Gay story is that her scholarly output, plagiarism or not, was astonishingly meager. As I recall there were exactly seven publications on her CV, none of them at all noteworthy, most of them not even peer reviewed. It is inexplicable how she even remained on the Harvard faculty, let alone got tenure and became president of the university. Something strange going on there.