If it applies, plagiarize!
I’m going to put a little different slant on plagiarism.
I’ve been following the blog of a certain Twitter Engineer and photographer for some time now. Dustin Diaz has taken on a small personal project where he takes 1 photograph each day for 365 days. Not of himself, necessarily, though some of the photographs are. The point is to take the time each and every day to be creative. He forces himself to take a photograph even if it’s 11:59 pm and he hasn’t done one yet for the day. It takes dedication and creative stamina to come up with something different every day, always trying something new.
After all that hard work, effort, and creative exhaustion, what happens? He becomes another casualty of plagiarism. Luckily, after following the incidents that took place over the past few months, the realization is that his photograph was only half plagiarized. The company that published the picture in one of their magazines did have a legal license to purchase his photograph, which they worked out with Getty Images, but they did not credit Dustin as the photographer. They still haven’t because they haven’t retracted the published credits in the magazine and the haven’t made reprints.
Plagiarism isn’t just confined to literary works. It applies to many different forms of intellectual property. Photographs are one such property and they are becoming increasingly popular to plagiarize. Though it is technically copyright infringement, to me, that is a form of plagiarism.
As a scientist in the Center for Information and Communication Sciences, how does this affect me? Well, scientists don’t just write ideas down. They may want to photograph something to go along with their research. This may be crucial for an accurate account of information. If it is plagiarized like the above example, it may have dire consequences for those who don’t know the work is plagiarized.
An example of an anti-ethical statement that I came up with: If it applies, plagiarize! If you use it and don't cite this blog, you're plagiarizing.
Let us not follow that statement, ever. Too many others already do, and you and I know better.