martedì 21 aprile 2009

plagiarism

good afternoon everybody. today's topic is plagiarism! what does this word mean? well, I'll give you an example immediately! :-)

Plagiarism is a delicate matter which can regard everybody, not necessarily students. I have to admit that its concept is not very clear to me. I think that no one in the world is not influenced by other ideas or creations: from painters who belong to the same artistic movement, to poets who use the same sytle of writing being inspired by the same poet, to musicians which grew up listening their favourite band. The line of demarcation between influence and plagiarism is not so clear-cut. For this reason, I consider plagiarism the intention to misappropriate other's work pretending that it is your own work.

or

I think that before publishing some material in a blog, one should always:
-control if the resource is under license or free
-read in what way a free resources can or cannot be modified
-quote the author or also create a link to the original source, even if the source is modified.
But, I suppose that it is impossible to avoid palgiarism, because we tend to share and publish things with a certain ease, without worring about the original author!

or

The basic idea is that when writing anything, be it an academic essay, our final thesis, or any kind of research work, we can not use someone else's thoughts without pointing out that we are doing so. This is worth both in the case of quotation or reformulation of someone else's words, but also in the case of the use of images.

ok! now take a look at some of the blogs of my peers... yes, did you notice? I copied and pasted some parts of their work!
my deepest apologies, ladies! ;-) this wanted just be a funny way to introduce plagiarism.
in plain words plagiarism is stealing someone else's work and pass it off as your own work! it is a really nasty way of doing things, and it is very annoying for the real author who put a great amount of effort in writing something.
plagiarism is present in any field related with artistic creations such as music, art, whatever...

I think it is acceptable to draw on someone else's work, but I want to underline it! draw on! not copy and paste. it is clear that two person may have the same opinion about something, but come on, please!!! there are so many way to express it! can't you use different words to say it instead of stealing it? you can, at least, cite the source of a very good sentence if you want! I would be happy to find a quotation of mine somewhere (well, if it is one among my "good" quotations!)

sometimes plagiarism may also be accidental, and this happens (quite) frequently with music. ok, there are so many artists that stole (and keep stealing) music from other artists, but I want to believe that most of the times this happens without malice. the web is full of examples of musical plagiarisms. if you don't believe me (and if you want to have some fun) have a look at this site!

to respect IPR and avoid plagiarism in my blog I always try to write things of my own, to use pictures of my own and, if I need to put a quotation in a post, I will put the sources of the quotation. in my long (too long, maybe) school career I never (I swear!) copied during examinations, texts, exams, quizzes and things like these (also because I'm not good at it) and I'm not planning to do it now.

during last lesson I learned about the existence of Fairshare, a very useful tool to find out if someone copied your own work. it is used by some teachers to check their students' works.

[the blog excerpts at the beginning of this post are from Francesca's blog (red), Sarah's (green) and Valentina's (orange)... I hope they're not bothered! :-P ]

1 commento:

  1. Hello Mario!
    I completely agree with you! It is acceptable that two people may have the same opinion about something, but there are also so many ways to express the same thing! Even though sometimes it happens to me that the best way to express my own concept about something that I read is to use the words of the author himself! I don't know why, but its much easier for me to start with a brief introduction using the words written by the author and then develop my own idea. I know it is very important to quote the words or sentences that we 'steal' from someone else!
    I also looked at the music web site that you suggested and there is a lot of fun!! It's incredible but musicians have at their disposal only eight notes and they inevitably fall into plagiarism which I think it could be made intentionally most of the times!
    I loved your way to demonstrate how plagiarism works, it was very clear!!! But it isn't a real plagiarism because you put the names of the people who wrote what you supposed to have stolen!! It was a great idea though!!
    I also like your way of writing...it is very 'simple' (not in the way that it could seem banal but in the sense that it is fluent and easy to read!) and it seems that you are always talking with an old friend which is a very nice way to involve the reader!

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