Is Plagiarism Still a Concept in an Age When Intellectual Property Itself is Questioned?

Photo Source: Brain Pickings

So, what exactly does one mean by creativity and self-expression in the digital age, when intellectual property itself is called into question?

I suppose the struggle against plagiarism is at least as old as the teaching profession itself, but I have to admit that I was caught off guard during the early days of the internet when, by about 2004, I noticed an uncommonly high number of impressive papers my students were turning in, but when I asked them to tell the class about what they had written they seemed barely able to read their own paper. Slowly, ever so slowly, it began to dawn on me that the reason they were having difficulty discussing their own work was because it wasn't their work at all. Up until that point it had never occurred to me that students might actually use the "copy and paste" function of their browser to plagiarize their assignments. When I was growing up we didn't have this option available to us -- in fact, there was no such thing as a "personal computer". In retrospect, I now see that I was hopelessly naive.

I was so scandalized by the practice that for years a waged a holy crusade against it. If students couldn't be bothered to take the time to write their own papers, I reasoned, why should I be bothered to take the time to grade them?

But my students grew up within a different cultural ethos from the one that I grew up in; and they had a different understanding by what one means by "self-expression". They grew up in an age when "sampling" has become an art form and re-purposing texts leads to prolific content. The believed that even if someone else created the phrases and images, if they took them, re-arranged them, and gave them their own meaning in order to express something other than was intended by the original artist or writer, that the content was fair game. These, of course, were the best of the students -- those who did not plagiarize their work wholesale, merely removing the author's name from the content and inserting their own.

Still, I was personally affronted by the notion of using someone else's work, even if it was "re-purposed," without attribution.

Recently Maria Popova, in her insightful site "Brain Pickings" reviewed a book by Kenneth Goldsmith, who actually encourages his students to plagiarize, called Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith tells his students to have at it -- go ahead and try to plagiarize; his thinking is that one cannot avoid being self-expressive, even when one is appropriating someone else's work. The key is that students must work with and process the text that they are plagiarizing.

Goldsmith believes that digital technology is rife with mixing and mash-ups of content and that this practice is not really a radical departure from what was being done during the analog days. The difference in the digital age is the in the ease and speed with which the process can be done.

Rather than blaming today's content-producers, especially students -- for being "unoriginal" in contrast with students in the past, Goldsmith believes that we once had a false notion of exaggerated originality that today's digital culture is disabusing us of, enabling us to understand that creativity is, and always was, something that pieces together the bits and shreds of many ideas and much content that floats freely in our cultural environment, and that we pick from the air in order to give voice to our own need for self-expression.

We were never as purely original, Goldsmith might argue, as we once thought we were.

This Copyright Criminals trailer gives a concise sample, if I may use that term, of the controversy over sampling, creativity, the nature of culture and the nature of human progress: