Plagiarism and the Internet
This morning I saw this ad over at adsoftheworld.com, and I was delighted. If you’ve read my posts here, you know I love ads that speak volumes with minimal words—or no words at all. This ad does it perfectly. Being a “night owl” myself, I connected with it instantly.
Then I read the comments.
Seems this ad was a pretty deliberate rip-off of a threadless.com shirt.
Needless to say, the piece is starting to get flamed pretty badly in the comments section as scores of designers call out the agency, JWT Mumbai, India. And the fact that the agency is from India is interesting because post-Internet, an agency in India stealing a t-shirt idea from the US would probably go unnoticed. But now it’s becoming increasingly harder to get away with plagiarism.
But at the same time, in today’s Internet “share this” culture, the lines between plagiarism and sharing becomes increasingly blurred—or intentionally ignored. On one hand, companies and individuals want their work to spread virally across millions of blogs and social networks. On the other hand, millions of people mistake this shared work as the original creation of the person sharing—especially when no attribution is given or it’s hidden in small print. It’s a double edged sword of exposure and anonymity.
The proliferation of plagiarism on the Internet has resulted in a handful of systems and software that troll the web for stolen ideas and work. But as Michael Schrage writes for the Harvard Business Blog, “Plagiarize Your Way to Productivity and Profit“, organizations may want to rethink using these systems and software as a means to crack down on plagiarism. Maybe we should be rethinking attribution:
There’s another spin that can be put on the software and systems for plagiarism detection and intellectual property protection. Right now, the dominant effort is to deter, or catch, a thief. I think smart organizations — organizations that care about information sharing, knowledge management, and creative collaboration — should see all this as infrastructure for creating new cultures of attribution. These technologies should be more than high-tech tools to track cheaters; they should be mechanisms for showing how organizations share ideas.
If you’re Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, IBM, or McKinsey, you’ve got millions of documents, PowerPoints, presentations, speeches, and spreadsheets swirling through your enterprise. If you’re Siemens, Merck, Sony, or Toyota, you want your best people to be aware of the ideas and intellectual property they’re creating throughout the firm. Instead of using Turnitin/iThenticate systems to identify plagiarists, you want to use it to see where the expressions of ideas and insights overlap and intersect. Even if people are borrowing PowerPoint slides or promotional paragraphs as part of their patent applications or sales pitches, you want them to know — and you want the firm’s leadership to know — what’s being borrowed and what expressions are being diffused inside the organization and out.
In other words, technologies like this can dissolve once-meaningful distinctions between “plagiarism” and “attribution” because they create transparency about the creation and distribution of ideas. Automating the attribution process gives more people greater confidence that they won’t be “ripped off” by potentially “credit- grabbing” colleagues. Conversely, good/great organizational “artists” can feel more confident “borrowing/stealing” from colleagues and counterparts because they know they’ll be “caught.”
The beauty of systems like this is their win/win potential. Creative people can get credit and attribution; people who use the creative expression of others to enhance a product or a service, or close a deal, also get acknowledged. The organization has turned “plagiarism” from a furtive crime into a transparent engine of attributed productivity.
It’s true that in the post-print society we’re moving beyond the don’t reproduce without written permission clauses. But plagiarism is still a huge problem because at its heart, plagiarism most often is the attempt to profit from another person’s work by passing it off as your own—not a means of highlighting someone else’s work because you appreciate it.
In a world where we blur the lines between plagiarism and sharing by rethinking attribution, do we really solve the problem—or do we just let the plagiarists win?
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